Barbara Kiviat

Articles from Contributor

New Business Creates Most Jobs

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 …

Farewell

That homeownership story I’ve been going on and on about is the cover story of the magazine coming out today. You can read the first few paragraphs here. Unfortunately, to read the entire thing you have to either buy a paper copy or subscribe on the iPad. We’ve been over our feelings about this set-up before. In a couple of weeks, you’ll …

Is this a small business recession?

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 …

What happens if more people want to rent?

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. Indeed, tens of millions of …

Crisis control the JetBlue way

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 frustrations …

The sideways economy

The headline from this morning’s Labor Department jobs report isn’t cheery: the number of people on payroll fell by 131,000 in July. That’s not the direction we need to be going. The payroll number for June was also revised downward, from 125,000 jobs lost to 221,000.

It’s important, though, to look at the difference between what’s …

  1. Previous
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. ...
  6. 34