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 …
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 …
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 …
Back in May, I did a Q&A with University of Chicago economist Raghu Rajan, who argues that income inequality contributed to the financial crisis. Over the weekend, the NYT dove into that topic, highlighting the work of Harvard Business School’s David Moss:
Mr. Moss said that income inequality might have complicated links to financial
…
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. Indeed, tens of millions of …
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 home ownership in the U.S. For …
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 …
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 …
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 spending or less. The debate isn’t …
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 …
Today’s Senate hearing about for-profit colleges provides something to think about for anyone who feels privatization is the Great Solution to what ails the U.S. education system. We’ve already heard the stories about how much more often students at profit-seeking schools default on their loans. Now we have an inside look at the hard …
