Showing results 1 - 10 of 172
| Jason Furman | Willie Powell
June 4, 2021, Opinion: "The US economy added 559,000 jobs in May, similar to the average of 533,000 jobs over the previous three months and much faster than the pace in the three months before that. This still leaves the economy 10 million jobs short of its trend. At the same time the unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent, but labor force participation also fell slightly and is lower than it was last summer. The “realistic” unemployment rate (…
| Jason Furman | Willie Powell
May 17, 2021, Opinion: "he US economy lost a net of 8 million jobs between February 2020 and April 2021. Agreement is growing that people not actively seeking employment (inadequate labor supply) have been playing a major role in the slow recovery, as evidenced by factors including record job openings, the largest wage increases in decades, and other signs of a tighten labor market than would generally be expected given the still low levels of…
| Jason Furman
May 12, 2021, Audio: "Jason Furman, Harvard University Aetna Professor of Economic Policy, says some states should start rethinking unemployment insurance. Alicia Levine, BNY Mellon Chief Investment Strategist, says a little bit of inflation is positive for Main Steet. Thierry Wizman, Macquarie Capital Director of Global Currencies & Interest Rate Strategist, is not positive on iron. Steve Ricchiuto, Mizuho Securities Chief U.S. Economist,…
| Jason Furman | Willie Powell
May 7, 2021, Opinion: "The United States added 266,000 jobs in April while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 6.1 percent with the realistic unemployment rate, which adjusts for misclassification and the unusual decline in labor force participation, falling to 7.6 percent as more people entered the labor market. The economy was still 10 million jobs short of its pre-pandemic trend in April with the employment rate down 3.2 percentage points…
| Gordon Hanson
May/June 2021, Opinion: "For decades, the promise of globalization has rested on a vision of a world in which goods, services, and capital would flow across borders as never before; whatever its other features and components, contemporary globalization has been primarily about trade and foreign investment. Today’s globalized economy has been shaped to a large extent by a series of major trade agreements that were sold as win-win propositions:…
| Gabriel Chodorow-Reich
April 2021, Paper: "We provide evidence of the stock market wealth effect on consumption by using a local labor market analysis and regional heterogeneity in stock market wealth. An increase in local stock wealth driven by aggregate stock prices increases local employment and payroll in nontradable industries and in total, while having no effect on employment in tradable industries. In a model with consumption wealth effects and geographic…
| George Borjas
April 2021, Paper: "Immigrant supply shocks are typically expected to reduce the wage of comparable workers. Natives may respond to the lower wage by moving to markets that were not directly targeted by immigrants and where presumably the wage did not drop. This paper argues that the wage change observed in the targeted market depends not only on the size of the native response, but also on which natives choose to respond. A non-random response…
| Jason Furman | Willie Powell
March 5, 2021, Opinion: "The labor market improved in February 2021 as employers added 379,000 jobs, leaving the economy at 11.9 million jobs below its pre-pandemic trend. At the same time the unemployment rate fell to 6.2 percent. Throughout the pandemic the official unemployment rate has been kept down by a misclassification error and the unusually large withdrawal of millions of people from the workforce. Our estimate of the realistic…
| Jason Furman | Willie Powell
February 5, 2021, Opinion: "The labor market was essentially unchanged at the start of 2021 as employers added 49,000 jobs in January. Overall, the economy is 11.6 million jobs below its pre-pandemic trend with the unemployment rate elevated and the employment rate having fallen even more as millions of people have left the labor force. Unusually, while the unemployment rate has fallen steadily from 11.1 percent in June 2020 to 6.3 percent this…
January 21, 2021, Opinion: "Pay cuts and salary freezes have become an unfortunate hallmark of the Covid-19 recession. Over seven million employees have seen their wages drop since March, and a great many others have had their pay frozen. But a handful of companies have bucked this trend and increased pay despite the economic crisis. In November, yogurt maker Chobani announced that it was raising its workers’ lowest hourly wage from $13 to $15;…