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Blog
Men not working
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its May employment situation report today and the news was mostly grim. Sure, unemployment dropped to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent. But don’t get too excited, because almost all the new jobs created in May were for census-takers, and these folks will be unemployed again soon. In more bad [...]
Working Paper No. 601
Too Big to Fail in Financial Crisis
Regulatory forbearance and government financial support for the largest US financial companies during the crisis of 2007–09 highlighted a "too big to fail" problem that has existed for decades. As in the past, effects on competition and moral hazard were seen as outweighed by the threat of failures that would undermine the financial system and […]
Blog
One less worry
The world has its usual cornucopia of troubles, but if you were worried about federal deficits, you can at least set those aside and focus on unemployment, oil spills and other here-and-now concerns. That’s the message of Levy Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith in this lively interview with Ezra Klein. Galbraith offers this historical perspective: [...]
Blog
Greek for “default”
As the European financial crisis continues to percolate, by now a few irreducible facts are distressingly clear: First, Greece has no hope of repaying its debts as they are now constituted. Thus, the much-contested 110 billion euro bailout plan and the wider subsequent trillion-dollar bailout proferred by the Eurozone countries and the IMF are doomed [...]
Blog
A plague of debt
The Financial Times reports that the European Central Bank (ECB) has warned of a “financial contagion” risk from concerns about the debt of some European governments. Many readers of this blog will recall that a similar concern was important in the late 1990s, when debt and currency problems seemed to spread among Asian and Latin [...]
Blog
Wynne Godley, continued
The Economist has published this obituary of the late economist, whose career included a lengthy stint as head of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team. In the small world dept.: After a spell in business and a few years at the Treasury, he was enticed to King’s College, Cambridge, which 61 years earlier another economist-aesthete, John [...]
Blog
Why do women earn less?
In a paper called “Gender Segregation by the Clock,” Casey B. Mulligan of the University of Chicago has come out with some interesting new research on gender inequality in the labor market. It is a fascinating study showing that women are more likely to choose a regular 9 to 5 job. Prof. Mulligan says this may contribute [...]
Working Paper No. 600
Time and Poverty from a Developing Country Perspective
This study is concerned with the measurement of poverty in the context of developing countries. We argue that poverty rankings must take into account time use dimensions of paid and unpaid work jointly. Reviewing the current state of the literature on this topic, our methodology introduces a critical but missing analytical distinction between time poverty […]
Blog
The rain in Spain
A new report from the International Monetary Fund has turned attention, at least temporarily, from Greece to the larger potential problem of Spain, where unemployment is roughly 20 percent. A nice (if unsettling) summary: Spain’s economy needs far-reaching and comprehensive reforms. The challenges are severe: a dysfunctional labor market, the deflating property bubble, a large [...]
Blog
Promises, promises, and more promises
From today’s NY Times: The cost of public pensions has been systemically underestimated nationwide for more than two decades, say some analysts. By these estimates, state and local officials have promised $5 trillion worth of benefits while thinking they were committing taxpayers to roughly half that amount. As Dimitri Papadimitriou said on this blog recently, we [...]
One-Pager No. 3
“The Spectre of Banking”
A year and a half after the collapse in the financial markets, the debate about necessary “reforms” is still in its early stages, and none of the debaters seriously claims that his solution will in fact prevent a new crisis. The problem is that the proposed remedies deal with superficial matters of industrial organization and […]
Blog
Funding child labor
The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth has issued a report on an unintended consequence of women-empowering microfinance: an increase in child labor. The report underscores the importance of unpaid work–work performed mostly by women. A development program, small or big, should consider the constraint that unpaid care duties impose on women, and provide assistance through [...]