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• Pay Limits: Not Smart

  Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

  
  The Obama administration’s pay czar imposed limits on executive compensation for bailed-out Wall Street firms. Doug Elliott says the actions are not smart, sending the message to those employees that their pay will not be determined the same way as on the rest of Wall Street and will be considerably lower and more volatile. This risks losing the best people, since the ones that move are always those who have the best options elsewhere.

• Impact of Raising the Federal Minimum Wage

  Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:06:41 GMT

  The federal minimum wage is going up to $7.25 an hour. Some say the raise during a deep recession is a bad idea because it could cause employers to lay off more workers. Gary Burtless doesn’t think anyone will lose their job, but some future hires may be impacted. He says the most noticeable impact of the raise will be in the spending power of some workers.

• Increasing Employment, Skills and Earnings

  Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

  Testifying before the Council of the District of Columbia, Martha Ross called for renewed attention to programs connecting young people to job training and the labor market, urging attention to program quality rather than just numbers served.

• Living Wage Laws: How Much Do (Can) They Matter?

  Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  Harry Holzer examines the likely effects of “living wage” ordinances on employment outcomes, according to economic theory; as well as evidence on their actual effects.

• Periodic Payment of the Earned Income Tax Credit

  Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  Many low-income working families would benefit from a streamlined ability to access the proceeds of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) throughout the year as they pay for ongoing expenses like housing, child care, and transportation. The federal government should consider adopting a model for direct periodic payment of the EITC, as most other countries with in-work tax credits provide.

• Metro Raise: Boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit to Help Metropolitan Workers and Families

  Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  
  Slowed economic growth and rising prices for necessities like food, transportation, and child care threaten to exacerbate the challenges already facing America's low-income workers and their families. The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) could do more to help close the growing gap between stagnant wages and rising prices. "Metro Raise" demonstrates how an expanded and modernized EITC would benefit families and communities in the nation's major metropolitan areas.

• The Unemployment Rate and the Job Market

  Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  
  The March unemployment rate jumped to 5.1 percent, fueling concerns about a flagging economy. Rebecca Blank, noting the unusually high rates of long-term unemployment, recommends extending benefits to assist these workers who are clearly having difficulty finding jobs.

• Capital Account Liberalization, Real Wages, and Productivity

  Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  
  In new research, Peter Blair Henry shows the benefits of stock market opening for developing countries.

• New Economy Safety Net: A Proposal to Enhance Worker Adjustment Programs

  Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  
  Despite profound economic changes over recent years, America’s job-transition, or worker adjustment, program remains one of the weakest among advanced economies. Lael Brainard proposes fundamental changes in the nation’s programs in order to provide enhanced training and financial support to help American workers compete.

• Economic Mobility in America

  Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:00:00 GMT

  Event Information:
  

  • March 20, 2008, 9:00 AM to 11:45 AM
  
  

  A comprehensive look at the trends and issues that drive economic opportunity in America was released last month in a new volume by Brookings experts, "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America." On March 20, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings and the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project held a forum to discuss the findings on gender, race, immigration, and families in addition to new findings on education, international comparisons, trends, and wealth.

• The Middle-Class Squeeze

  Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

  Brookings Expert Gregg Easterbrook and Harvard Law School's Elizabeth Warren discuss the squeeze on the American middle class.

• Reward and Facilitate Work

  Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Although the overall economy has grown reasonably well in the last six years, the gains have not filtered down and the share of Americans in poverty has risen. Jason Furman suggests policy improvements to better facilitate the American dream.

• Better Workers for Better Jobs: Improving Worker Advancement in the Low-Wage Labor Market

  Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Hamilton Project's expert Harry J. Holzer proposes a new federal funding stream to identify, expand, and replicate the most successful state and local initiatives designed to spur the advancement of low wage workers in the United States.

• A Hand Up: A Strategy to Reward Work, Expand Opportunity, and Reduce Poverty

  Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Poverty remains a pressing problem in the United States. Many of the 36 million Americans in poverty are working, but full-time work at the minimum wage does not provide enough income to escape poverty. Jason Bordoff, Jason Furman, and Paige Shevlin offer a three-part strategy to reduce poverty and strengthen growth across the income spectrum.

• Facilitating and Rewarding Work

  Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:00:00 GMT

  Event Information:
  

  • December 12, 2007, 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM

  On December 12, the Hamilton Project at Brookings hosted a two-part forum at the National Press Club on ways to encourage, facilitate and reward work.  Besides releasing a new Hamilton Project strategy paper, the forum highlighted four new and forthcoming discussion papers.

• New Hope: Fulfilling America’s Promise to “Make Work Pay”

  Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Hans Bos, Greg J. Duncan, Lisa A. Gennetian and Heather D. Hill make the case for a national program offering the kind of work supports that were part of the New Hope program, a policy experiment that operated for three years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the mid- to late-1990s.

• Dealing Sensibly with the Threat of Disruption in Trade with China: The Analytics of Increased Economic Interdependence

  Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Noting widespread concern in Washington over the large and growing U.S.-China trade deficit, Brookings Scholar Wing Thye Woo discusses solutions to the present trade tensions.

• Fighting Poverty through Incentives and Work Mandates for Young Men

  Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  
  Wage subsidies and work requirements hold the promise of alleviating many social problems, especially poverty. Brookings’s Ron Haskins writes about counteracting the negative behaviors of adolescent boys and young men in a new brief.

• Trade and Globalization

  Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  
  In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Lael Brainard discussed trade and globalization. She argued that trade adjustment assistance is the core program for addressing dislocation associated with globalization.

• Strengthening the Nation's Safety Net

  Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  
  To understand how the new global economy is affecting American workers, look no further than Dave Bevard from Galesburg, Ill. Bevard recently testified to a congressional committee about the devastating effects of losing his job: "[We] believed that if you worked hard, played by the rules and made a quality product, you would be rewarded for your efforts. Instead . . . we were given a pink slip and told that our plant would close and move to Mexico . . . "

• How Effective are Existing Programs in Helping Workers Impacted by International Trade?

  Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Testimony by Lael Brainard before the Committee on Education and Labor (3/26/07)

• Meeting the Challenge of Income Instability

  Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

  Testimony by Lael Brainard before a Hearing of the Joint Economic Committee (2/28/07)

• The Interaction of Labor Markets and Inflation

  Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

   

• Services Offshoring, American Jobs, and the Global Economy

  Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

  Article by Lael Brainard and Robert E. Litan, Perspectives on Work (6/8/05)

• Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Re-Assessing the Revisionists

  Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

  A large literature documents a substantial rise in U.S. wage inequality and educational wage differentials over the past several decades and finds that these trends can be primarily accounted for by shifts in the supply of and demand for skills reinforced by the erosion of labor market institutions affecting the wages of low- and middle-wage workers. Drawing on an additional decade of data, a number of recent contributions reject this consensus to conclude that (1) the rise in wage inequality was an "episodic" event of the first-half of the 1980s rather than a "secular" phenomenon, (2) this rise was largely caused by a falling minimum wage rather than by supply and demand factors; and (3) rising residual wage inequality since the mid-1980s is explained by confounding effects of labor force composition rather than true increases in inequality within detailed demographic groups. We reexamine these claims using detailed data from the Current Population Survey and find only limited support. Although the growth of overall inequality in the U.S. slowed in the 1990s, upper tail inequality rose almost as rapidly during the 1990s as during the 1980s. A decomposition applied to the CPS data reveals large and persistent rise in within-group earnings inequality over the past several decades, controlling for changes in labor force composition. While changes in the minimum wage can potentially account for much of the movement in lower tail earnings inequality, strong time series correlations of the evolution of the real minimum wage and upper tail wage inequality raise questions concerning the causal interpretation of such relationships. We also find that changes in the college/high school wage premium appear to be well captured by standard models emphasizing rapid secular growth in the relative demand for skills and fluctuations in the rate of growth of the relative supply of college workers – though these models do not accurately predict the slowdown in the growth of the college/high-school gap during the 1990s. We conclude that these patterns are not adequately explained by either a 'unicausal' skill-biased technical change explanation or a revisionist hypothesis focused primarily on minimum wages and mechanical labor force compositional effects. We speculate that these puzzles can be partially reconciled by a modified version of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis that generates a polarization of skill demands.

• Social Norms, Rules of Thumb, and Retirement: Evidence for Rationality in Retirement Planning

  Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

  Paper by Gary Burtless (October 2004)

• What's Ahead After The GDP's Big Surge

  Fri, 31 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

  Opinion by George L. Perry (10/31/03)

• Worker Advancement in the Low-Wage Labor Market: The Importance of 'Good Jobs'

  Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

  Increasing access to employment at larger, high-wage firms can raise earnings prospects for low-wage workers, a new study shows.

• The Decline in Manufacturing Jobs In the Syracuse Metropolitan Area

  Thu, 06 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

  Paper by Robert W. Crandall

• The Migration of U.S. Manufacturing and Its Impact on the Buffalo Metropolitan Area

  Thu, 06 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

  Paper by Robert W. Crandall (6/22/02)

• A Prescription to Relieve Worker Anxiety

  Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:00 GMT

  Policy Brief #73, by Lori Kletzer and Robert Litan (March 2001)

• The New Public Service

  Tue, 09 Nov 1999 00:00:00 GMT

  
  Paul C. Light's new book, The New Public Service, examines federal careers and finds that they cannot compete for challenging work against the private and nonprofit sector.

• Asset Accumulation Among Low-Income Households

  Mon, 01 Nov 1999 00:00:00 GMT

  Asset Accumulation Among Low-Income Households"" paper by stacie carney and william gale, november 30, 1999. economic studies: brookings institution.

• Worker Capitalists? Giving Employees an Ownership Stake

  Wed, 01 Sep 1999 00:00:00 GMT

  Brookings Review article by Margaret M. Blair and Douglas L. Kruse (Fall 1999)

• The Plight of Low-Wage Workers In a Global Economy

  Tue, 30 Jun 1998 09:30:00 GMT

  Event Information:
  

  • June 30, 1998, 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM

• Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Microeconomics 1993:2

  Tue, 21 Dec 1993 00:00:00 GMT

  
  For almost thirty years, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) has provided academic and business economists, government officials, and members of the financial and business communities with timely research of current economic issues.

• Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Microeconomics 1991

  Thu, 20 Jun 1991 00:00:00 GMT

  
  For almost twenty years, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) has provided academic and business economists, government officials, and members of the financial and business communities with timely research of current economic issues.