Small businesses are the economy’s great job creators. Or are they? Last year a group of economists digging through new Census data, including a relatively rare measure of firm age, concluded that it’s actually young companies, especially start-ups, that drive the effect normally attributed to small firms. At least that was the take-away from looking [...]
Justin lives! And he’s guest blogging for Ezra Klein this week. Check it out here. Yesterday he blogged about… whether or not income inequality helped cause the financial crisis. Sound familiar? In addition to that blog post, Justin recently wrote this HBR piece in which he reviews the growing literature on the topic. He mentions the [...]
First-time claims for unemployment insurance benefits headed higher last week—not a good sign for the strength of the economic recovery. Or should I say “recovery”? The Department of Labor numbers, out this morning, mark the fourth increase in the past five weeks and the highest rate of claims in nine months. Another set of government [...]
This morning I was on the Brian Lehrer show talking about the Obama Administration’s conference on the future of housing finance. You can listen to the interview here. One thing that came up during the interview was this concept of renting. Strange as it may seem, renting is a key part of the housing market. [...]
Today the Obama Administration will host a conference on the future of housing finance. It’s a great topic, considering that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are more than $150 billion in the hole. But this is about more than what to do with the GSEs. There are bigger questions to ask about how we approach [...]
If you were running a company and one of your employees went ballistic on a customer before loading up on booze and dramatically storming off, thus garnering national attention, what would you do? Probably not respond by a blog post that prominently features a clip from Office Space, the 1999 movie about the humiliations and [...]
Investment manager John Michaelson has an interesting op-ed in today’s WSJ. He argues that super-low interest rates, which the Fed re-committed to yesterday, may be hindering, not helping, economic growth. There are plenty of reasons to not like low interest rates. For one thing, they help cause asset bubbles. For another, they hurt people and [...]
It’s easy to rag on economics as not being a “real” science, and I try not to do things that are too easy. But in recent weeks I’ve really started to wonder. It is fascinating, and frightening, to me that smart economists can disagree about whether what the economy needs right now is more government [...]
