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  Summary No. 3

  Summary Summer 1997

  Among the activities summarized in this issue are a series of three papers in which Visiting Scholar David A. Aschauer estimates static and dynamic effects of public capital investment on output and employment growth. Contents: New Working Papers: Real Estate and the Capital Gains Debate * Do States Optimize? Public Capital and Economic Growth * […]
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  Summary No. 2

  Summary Spring 1997

  At an ASSA session, “The Contributions of Hyman Minsky,” scholars from the Levy Institute and elsewhere presented seven papers on the development and lasting influence of the distinguished scholar’s work. Portions of the papers are synopsized in this issue. Contents: Exploring the Politics of the Minimum Wage * Protracted Frictional Unemployment as a Heavy Cost […]
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  Summary No. 1

  Summary Fall–Winter 1996–1997

  Featured in this double issue are reports on a workshop on the future of the welfare state, papers on assimilation of past and present immigrants and on selective migration among immigrants around 1900 by Joel Perlmann, and papers on alternative definitions of the United States’ fiscal deficit by Neil H. Buchanan. Contents: New Public Policy […]
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  Working Paper No. 182

  Literacy among the Jews of Russia in 1897

  Researchers exploring Jewish literacy have traditionally ignored the Russian Census of 1897 on the grounds that it underreported Jewish literacy. Most have felt that the low literacy percentage reported for Jews could not possibly be accurate and therefore scholars have ignored the value of the Census as a research tool. In a study that compares […]
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  Working Paper No. 181

  Which Immigrant Occupational Skills?

  Researchers have long sought explanations for the success of Jews who migrated to the United States at the turn of the century in attaining middle-class status. East European Jews arrived in the United States at the same time as many other ethnic groups between 1880 and 1920, yet achieved economic success far faster. In the […]
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  Working Paper No. 180

  The Utilization of Human Capital in the US, 1975–1992

  The experience that comes with age and the productive capacity of youth are both assets widely underused in the American labor market, according to Research Associate Robert Haveman and co-authors Lawrence Buron and Andrew Bershadker of the University of Wisconsin. To measure the use of American labor, the authors developed an indicator called the capacity […]
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  Working Paper No. 179

  Protracted Frictional Unemployment As a Heavy Cost of Technical Progress

  In this working paper, Research Associates William Baumol and Edward N. Wolff, both of New York University, explore the effects of the rate of technological progress on unemployment. They hypothesize that the sunk costs associated with a worker’s training will depend on his or her previous training and education and the current pace of technological […]
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  Report No. 6

  Report December 1996

  This issue features the Debates-Debates program on the advisability of implementing tax cuts, Katherine Newman’s findings on the ability of the working poor to find work, Eugene R. Dattel’s view of structural flaws in the Japanese financial sector, and Resident Scholar Neil Buchanan’s critique of several tax proposals and analysis of the relation between taxes […]
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  Public Policy Brief No. 28

  Making Work Pay

  Barry Bluestone of the University of Massachusetts and Teresa Ghilarducci of the University of Notre Dame show that although the poverty rate for elderly Americans has declined over the past three decades, the total number of persons in poverty has grown and the number of poor nonelderly adults in poverty has nearly doubled since 1970. […]
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  Working Paper No. 178

  The Collapse of Low-skill Wages

  No recent development in the American labor market has been more dramatic and troubling than the collapse in the buying power of workers’ paychecks. This drop in the value of wages coincided with a sharp increase in earnings inequality. Perhaps the most highly publicized characteristic of recent earnings trends has been the widening gap between […]
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  Working Paper No. 177

  Taxes, Saving, and Macroeconomics

  Resident Scholar Neil H. Buchanan offers an analysis of the macroeconomic effects of current proposals to reform the tax system (e.g., a flat tax or a national sales tax), focusing on the aspects of the proposals aimed at promoting saving. Buchanan notes that a drawback in the way in which saving is officially defined is […]
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  Working Paper No. 176

  Exploring the Politics of the Minimum Wage

  Resident Scholar Oren M. Levin-Waldman argues that, although the minimum wage is a serious economic issue, enacting an increase in the minimum wage is a political one. He finds that because the empirical results of an increase in the wage floor are “inconclusive,