American Economy Essays

Wage growth is weak for a tight labor market—and the pace of wage growth is uneven across race and gender.

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Josh Bivens argues that wage growth happens if and only if policymakers make it a top priority.

Recent months’ low unemployment will pay much larger dividends for workers going forward if it represents a genuine shift in how policymakers weigh the benefits of wage growth versus the risks of inflation, and if it is accompanied by policies that build—or restore—institutions that support workers’ bargaining power.

They note the erosion in the federal minimum wage over time, and show that wage growth for low-wage workers has been far faster in states that have enacted meaningful increases in minimum wages.

Black workers endure persistent racial disparities in employment outcomes.

Not surprisingly, much bad development policy resulted from that neglect.

Even if policymakers in developed countries and international institutions now recognize the critical role played by a system of private property in economic development, they are limited in what they can do to help developing countries evolve such a system.That dominion over what is theirs leads property users to take full account of all the benefits and costs of employing those resources in a particular manner.The process of weighing costs and benefits produces what economists call efficient outcomes.The nation’s unemployment rate has been at or below 4% for the past year and a half.But while a single 18-month stretch of sub-4% unemployment is a good start on an improving labor market, it’s far from sufficient to undo the damage done by a decades-long policy assault on the economic leverage that workers can exert.Daniel Costa explains how employers have weaponized the nation’s immigration system to keep both immigrant and U. Prosperity and property rights are inextricably linked.Jhacova Williams and Valerie Wilson highlight continued racial gaps in unemployment, and construct a new indicator of underemployment that measures the underutilization of workers’ credentials.Their measure of underemployment examines the share of college graduates who do not obtain employment in “college occupations”—occupations in which more than half of the workforce have a college degree.Policymakers can, however, avoid recommending policies that undermine private property.The excuses for development failure are legion: lack of natural resources; insufficient funding of education, culture, religion, and history; and, recently, geographical location.