According to several conservative bloggers and columnists, back in the 1990s economist Alan Krueger (with his colleague David Card) wrote a “fatally flawed,” “faulty,” “tortured,” and subsequently “disputed,” “debunked,” and “demolished” study on the employment impact of the 1992 increase in the New Jersey State minimum wage. This 15-year-old research is in the news now […]
In response to the nomination of Alan Krueger to head the Council of Economic Advisors, National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog has published an embarrassingly ignorant attack on minimum-wage research that Krueger did with David Card back in the 1990s. The post reheats the very stale talking points pushed by fast-food lobbyist Richard Berman circa […]
Sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld have a great paper in the current issue of the American Sociological Review on the effect of unions on wage inequality in the United States. Researchers including David Card (pdf), Richard Freeman, John DiNardo (pdf) and others long ago established that unions reduce wage inequality, primarily by compressing wage […]
The graphic accompaning physicist Mark Buchanan’s recent opinion piece at Bloomberg is one of the best short summaries I’ve seen so far of the challenge facing our efforts to restructure world financial markets: The photograph is also an excellent visual representation of Buchanan’s main point: Efficiency is generally a good thing. We don’t want our […]
The socialist prime minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero –apparently at the suggestion of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel– has proposed amending the Spanish constitution to ensure that the government never runs a deficit larger than 0.4 percent of GDP. The proposal, which the Spanish right-wing opposition Popular Party has embraced, would be an unambiguous […]
As I discussed in an earlier post, Vicente Navarro lays an important part of the blame for the European debt crisis on the right-wing regimes in power in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland in the aftermath of World War II. While the rest of Europe was building modern welfare states –complete with tax regimes capable […]
Over half of male college graduates (59 percent) and almost half of female college graduates (47 percent) believe that “the higher education system” is “only fair” or “poor” in “providing value for the money spent by students and their families,” according to a new poll (pdf) released by the Pew Research Center last week. Given […]
Unless European officials can find a viable solution soon, the continent’s sovereign debt crisis threatens to derail the increasingly fragile world economic recovery. The conventional wisdom blames Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland — the poorer “peripheral” countries at the center of the crisis — for “living beyond their means.” In an important new paper, however, […]
