Robert Waldmann Oh good, Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias disagree. This is bound to be interesting. Drum remembers the good old days when liberals had less respect for the standard results of simple neoclassical economic models. The specific issue is that firms are using credit scores to decide who to hire. This can trap some […]

The New York Times and The Guardian report on the posting of archival documents by Wikileaks. Reporting appears to be similar so far until they are read and sorted.

by Bruce Webb Over at Open Left they are revisiting the concept of Conservatism and whether it is a coherent philosophy. And after concluding that Conservatives by and large have failed to come up with their own definition proceeded to advance some of their own, that it is about enabling aristocracy, or institutionalizing suffering, or […]

Robert Waldmann For decades, I have been advising Democrats to focus attention on the progressivity of the tax system. This is an issue where the vast majority of US adults totally disagree with the Republicans and which people care about. My policy proposal and political strategy is to increase progressivity increasing taxes on the rich […]

by Mike Kimel Presimetrics on, er, in Parade (Magazine) Cross-posted at the Presimetrics blog. For a long time, I knew the date that Presimetrics, the book I wrote with Michael Kanell, was going to be released – August 11. The date was recently pushed back later in the month. But, the other day some interesting […]

For those interested in more information on job creation in the Employment Dynamics database these three article provide very good information. Cordelia Okolie, “Why Size Class Methodology Matters in Analyses of Net and Gross Job Flows.” July 2004 Monthly Labor Review Jessica Helfand, Akbar Sadeghi and David Talan, “Employment Dynamics: Small and Large Firms Over […]

Standard analysis is that military spending for WW II provided the significant Keynesian stimulus that ended the depression. I have nothing new to add to that debate, but I recently looked at the data and found it somewhat surprising. The surprise was not in what happened to military spending as the military swung from 0.5 […]

It was their idea, so it’s no surprise they like paying interest on reserves, even excess reserves: For quite a while, the Fed was quite happy to have that money on its books. Indeed, the power to pay interest on reserves was considered a key tool to keep control over all the liquidity the Fed […]

CoRev brought up the claim that small firms account for 70% of job creation in the US economy. Several years ago the Small Business Administration and Census began an annual survey of employment by firm size. You can find the data here: http://www.census.gov/econ/susb/historical_data.html Here is a table of what the joint survey of employment by […]