Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

There is great buzz over today’s jobs report. The economy added 321,000 jobs in November. The New York Times: “After more than five years of elusive gains, ordinary Americans may finally be about to see the benefits of the recovery where it really counts: in their pocketbooks and wallets. … For the year as a …

This One Figure Shows How the New Deal Made the Great Depression Worse (updated)

Source: Barry Eichengreen, "The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump Revisited" So U.S. real wages rose more or less throughout the Great Depression. During the Hoover years, you can write this phenomenon off as sticky wages plus the Federal Reserve's disastrous policy of deflation, plus some of Hoover's jawboning of executives to get them …

Nominal Wage Growth Over Time

Here are quarterly data on "usual weekly earnings" in current dollars from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The first graph shows the first (lowest) decile of wage earners. The second shows the ninth (why not the tenth? BLS does not make that an option). These data should be relevant to the debate over whether most …

Trade and Employment

I teach my undergraduates that trade has no long-run effect on aggregate employment. I teach it because it's right, and very few economists would disagree. Tyler Cowen's recent postings on MR about the negative employment effects of trade have the potential to mislead. To the extent that trade and technology correlate with persistent disemployment in …

Occupational Licensing as an Implicit Barrier to High Skill Migration

That's the subtitle of a new working paper from Peterson, Pandya, and Leblang. Here's the abstract: Skills are often occupation-specific, a fact missing from existing research on the political economy of immigration. Although analyses of survey data suggest broad support for skilled migration occupational licensing regulations persist as formidable barriers to skilled migrants’ labor market …

The Paycheck Fairness Act vs the Market

As you likely know, the Paycheck Fairness Act died in the Senate earlier this week, with strong GOP opposition. (see coverage here). The key provisions of the bill are nicely summarized in the Christian Science Monitor: The legislation…would require employers to prove that differences in pay are based on qualifications, education and other "bona fides" not …

Texas Job Numbers and Inter-State Migration

Political Math's piece on Texas' amazing job growth has been getting a lot of attention around the 'Net. As regular Pileus readers know and as Political Math's piece confirms, job growth is largely a consequence of population growth, and population growth is largely a consequence of warm climate, low cost of living, low taxes, and …

Reforming Trade Adjustment and Unemployment Assistance

Matthew Slaughter and Robert Lawrence have an interesting little proposal in the NY Times: abolishing Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), rolling it into unemployment insurance, and reforming the program so as to reduce its work disincentives. They also advocate special tax treatment for unemployed workers' expenditures on job retraining. They sell the plan, which they say …

A Deficit-Neutral Plan to Slash Unemployment

While the U.S. economy has been officially out of recession for a while and growing at a decent clip (1.8% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the first quarter of this year, 3.1% in the last quarter of 2010 - see chart), unemployment remains very unusually high, 9.0% in April 2011 (seasonally adjusted), compared …