Author Archives: Susann Lees

For economists, the idea of “spending” time isn’t a metaphor. You can spend any resource, not just money. Among all the inequalities in our world, it remains true that every person is allocated precisely the same 24 hours in each day. In “Escaping the Rat Race: Why We Are Always Running Out of Time,” theContinue reading “Daniel Hamermesh: How Do People Spend Time?”

It often takes a number of intermediate steps to move from a scientific discovery to a consumer product. A few decades ago, many larger and even mid-sized corporations spent a lot of money on research and development laboratories, which focused on all of these steps. Some of these corporate laboratories like those at AT&T, DuContinue reading “Time for a Return of Large Corporation Research Labs?”

For a long time, the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) carried out monetary policy with little or no explanation. The idea was that the market would figure it out. But in the last few decades, there has been an explosions of communication and transparency from the Fed (and other central banks), consisting both ofContinue reading “Does the Federal Reserve Talk Too Much?”

Alice Rivlin, who died yesterday, was a legend in the Washington policy community. In “Alice Rivlin: A career spent making better public policy,” Fred Dewes interviewed Rivlin for the Brookings Cafeteria Podcast on March 8, 2019.  If you would like some additional detail about Rivlin’s career, there’s a shorter interview from 1998 by Hali J.Continue reading “Alice Rivlin, 1931-2019, In Her Own Words”

In a lot of economic models, firms decide to hire based on whether they need more workers to meet the demand for their products; in the lingo, labor is a “derived demand,” derived from the desired level of output. Beyond that, economic models often don’t pay much attention to the details of how hiring happens,Continue reading “Are Firms Doing a Lousy Job in How they Hire?”

Back in the late 1970s when I was first reading about the world economy in any serious way, it was still common to describe the world as divided into “first world” market-driven high income economies, “second world” command-and-control economies, and “third world” low-income countries. Jonathan Woetzel offers a commentary on the sources of that nomenclature,Continue reading “The Origin of "Third World" and Some Ruminations”

Back in the 1960s, the poverty rate for those over-65 was about 10 percentage points higher than the poverty rate for children under 18. For example, in 1970 the over-65 poverty rate was about 25%, while the under-18 poverty rate was 15%. But government support for the elderly rose substantially, and  in the 1970s, theContinue reading “How To Cut US Child Poverty in Half”

The monthly unemployment rate in April fell to 3.6%, the lowest monthly rate since December 1969. It’s now been a 4.0% or less for more than a year. But in this generally quite positive employment environment, low-skill male workers have been an ongoing sore spot. The issues are discussed in a three-paper symposium in theContinue reading “Low-Skill Male Workers: A Black Spot on the Rosy Employment Outlook”

As Americans recover from our annual April 15 deadline for filing income taxes, here are a series of figures about longer-term patterns of taxes in the US economy. They are drawn from a series of blog posts by the Tax Foundation over the last few months.  The Tax Foundation is a nonpartisan group whose analysis typicallyContinue reading “Snapshots of US Income Taxation Over Time”

I was hired back in 1986 to be the Managing Editor for a new academic economics journal, at the time unnamed, but which soon launched as the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which back in 2011 decided–to my delight–that it would be freely available on-line, from theContinue reading “Spring 2019 Journal of Economic Perspectives Available Online”