All work on this topic

• How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled

  Reinhart-Rogoff lasted longer, even though serious questions about their work were raised early on. As early as July 2010 Josh Bivens and John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute had identified both a clear mistake—a misinterpretation of US data immediately after World War II—and a severe conceptual problem. Reinhart and Rogoff, as they pointed out, offered no evidence that the correlation ran from high debt to low growth rather than the other way around, and other evidence suggested that the latter was more likely. But such criticisms had little impact; for austerians, one might say, Reinhart-Rogoff was a story too good to check.

   

  The New York Review of Books | May 15, 2013

• While Wall Street soars, jobs market still scarred

  “Most of the improvement that we’ve seen in the unemployment rate hasn’t been due to increased job opportunities. It’s been due to people dropping out of, or never entering, the labor market because of weak opportunities,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “Most of that decline is not coming from what would really be considered meaningful improvement in the unemployment rate.”

  McClatchy | May 15, 2013

• Weak labor market awaits Class of 2013

  “In addition to the substantial share who are officially unemployed, a large swath of these young, highly educated workers have either a job but cannot attain the hours they need or want a job but have given up looking for work,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

   

  Reuters | May 15, 2013

• Please Don’t Use a ‘Best Places to Retire’ List to Decide Where to Retire

  This is another misleading one. Economist Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute argues that standard cost-of-living formulas — the kind used by most “best of” lists — don’t accurately reflect senior citizens’ expenses since they spend more on medical goods and services that are increasing in price faster than the overall rate of inflation.

   

   

  Time Magazine | May 15, 2013

• No Shortage of Science Majors—But We Still Need More

  “If you had majored in computer science instead of art history, you wouldn’t be waiting tables to pay back those student loans.”

  It’s a common refrain, but a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute found, despite conventional wisdom, there is no labor market shortage for science, technology, engineering, and math (also known as “STEM”) graduates.

  If there was, the authors argue, the STEM grads we do have would be seeing rising wages and falling unemployment as demand outpaces supply. But that’s not the case according to the study.

   

  Campus Progress | May 15, 2013

• America’s New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley’s Shady 1 Percenters

  Ostensibly, the increase in visas for high-skilled computer workers is a needed response to the critical shortage of such workers here—a notion that has been repeatedly dismissed, including in a recent report from the Obama-aligned Economic Policy Institute, which found that the country is producing 50 percent more IT professionals each year than are being employed in the field. The real appeal of the H1B visas for “guest workers”—who already take between a third and half of all new IT jobs in the States —is that they are usually paid less than their pricy American counterparts, and are less likely to jump ship since they need to remain employed to stay in the country.

   

  Daily Beast | May 15, 2013

• Business, labor spar over high-skill visas in immigration bill

  Daniel Costa, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, also criticized the proposed amendments, saying that the requirements on high-skilled visas “don’t seem to be very onerous.”

  The sweeping immigration bill, written by the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators, would tighten border security, provide a 13-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and revamp visa programs.

  Reuters | May 15, 2013

• Keystone XL divides influential entrepreneurs, spills over into the immigration reform debate

  Critics point to a growing collection of research that suggests otherwise, including a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, which showed virtually no “skills gap” in the labor force.

  The Washington Post | May 15, 2013

• Failing the Test: Why cheating scandals and parent rebellions are erupting in schools in New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.

  More damningly, a new study, by the Economic Policy Institute’s Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, quantifies the negative effects of this test-driven education reform in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago. In these cities, schools whose achievement scores didn’t improve quickly enough to satisfy top officials were shuttered, teachers and principals were fired in droves, and charter schools proliferated. The result, since the much-touted reforms were implemented: Since the supposed reforms, students in those cities have fared worse than those in other urban districts. 

   

  Slate | May 9, 2013

• Counterparties: Bipartisan disagreements

  On the other side of the aisle, a separate immigration debate is also brewing. Two weeks ago, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute released a study concluding that we don’t need more temporary H-1B visas, which are mostly used to bring engineers and scientists to the United States. “Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guest workers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce,” the report states.

   

  Reuters | May 9, 2013

• An H-1B jobs database the tech industry may hate: Database is meant to help improve the odds of a U.S. worker being hired over a foreign worker, but just what does ‘good faith’ hiring mean?

  Daniel Costa, an immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, says the immigration bill only requires non H-1B dependent employers to “recruit” by using the proposed Labor Dept.’s database. A good faith effort isn’t required.

  “I think it’s crazy not to require that all employers do good faith recruiting,” said Costa. “If the tech companies are truly recruiting U.S. workers like crazy as they say they are — then why do they object to proving that they’re already doing what they say they’re doing?”

   

  Computerworld | May 9, 2013

• Obama pressed to do more on jobs, stagnant wages

  “With aggressive fiscal stimulus we can bring the unemployment rate down rapidly; Washington has gone entirely in the other direction,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

  Associated Press | May 9, 2013

• Obamacare Tax Aimed At ‘Cadillac Plans’ Will Hurt Ordinary Workers: Report

  The Affordable Care Act includes a tax on high-cost insurance plans that’s both a funding mechanism for the law and meant to encourage patients with a menu of generous health benefits to choose only necessary services. But the tax could wind uphurting workers who pay premium dollars for not-so-premium health plans, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

  “[The tax] was sold as being on ‘Cadillac Coverage.’ The idea was that there were some people out there that are getting thousands and thousands of dollars worth health insurance premiums,” said Elise Gould, the director of health policy research at EPI and the author of the report. “But the reality is that health insurance premiums can be expensive for many different reasons, not just because they have generous coverage.”

  The Huffington Post | May 9, 2013

• Employers lack confidence, not skilled labor

  If shortages were widespread, Burtless and other economists argue, wages would be rising rapidly as employers competed for scarce skilled workers. There’s scant evidence of this. From April 2012 to April 2013, average hourly manufacturing wages rose 1 percent, reports the Labor Department. Over the same period, the gain for all private nonfarm workers was 1.9 percent. Among computer programmers, inflation-adjusted wages have remained flat for a decade, says a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

   

  The Washington Post | May 7, 2013

• Heritage says immigration reform will cost $5.3 trillion. Here’s why that’s wrong.

  Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation have made a splash byreleasing a paper claiming that the immigration reform bill being weighed in the U.S. Senate will cost the government $5.3 trillion. Or, more precisely, that undocumented immigrants under current law will cost the government $1 trillion, and legalizing those immigrants will increase that to $6.3 trillion. Subtract one from the other and you get the $5.3 trillion total cost estimate.

  The study represents the most notable attack on the reform effort to date from a conservative group, and in conjunction with the Economic Policy Institute’s attempts tothrow cold water over the high-skilled immigration sections of the bill, suggests the effort is facing flack from both sides.

  The Washington Post | May 7, 2013

• Hypothetical pay for mothers falls, reflecting stagnant U.S. wages

  The hypothetical mom salary stagnated as U.S. wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent of GDP in 2012. For many workers, wages have been stagnant for the past decade, according to the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

  Reuters | May 7, 2013

• A fair minimum wage is a measure of decency

  The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 30 million workers would benefit from the hike in the minimum wage and that would help generate about 140,000 new jobs.

  The Chicago Sun Times | May 7, 2013

• Jobs Report Positive, But Not Good Enough

  An economist with the labor-focused Economic Policy Institute called the report a disaster, saying it would take five whole years for the current rate of growth to return the country to full employment.

  “This is a classic ‘hold-steady’ report — enough job growth to keep the unemployment rate stable but not much more,” EPI’s Heidi Sheirholz said in a statement. “In good times, this would be fine, but at a time like this, it represents an ongoing disaster.”

   

  The Huffington Post | May 7, 2013

• Vote: How’s hiring at your workplace?

  Job growth picked up in April, with the economy adding 165,000 new jobs. Still, the unemployment rate barely budged downward and the length of the average workweek actually declined from 34.6 to 34.4. (Here’s the report in charts). Economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institutecalled this “a substantial drop that is not a good sign for future hiring.” And although the number of jobs created was above that needed to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force, Shierholz said that at the growth rate seen this year — around 196,000 jobs a month — “it will take more than five years to return to the prerecession unemployment rate.” For high-school graduates, the economy keeps getting worse. 

   

  Seattle Times | May 7, 2013

• Employment Numbers Tell Us A Lot (But Not That Much)

  “Yes, this was better than people were expecting. That’s the source of the breathless, happy responses that come out right away,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “But as you sit back and say, ‘What does this say about the labor market,’ it’s not so good, because it remains more of the same.”

  The actual change in unemployment, she notes, was from 7.57 to 7.51 percent. At this rate of jobs growth, Shierholz says, it would take more than five years to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate.

  NPR | May 7, 2013

• Lack of jobs pushes 4.4 million out of work force

  Economist Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, using data from researchers at the Boston Federal Reserve, found that approximately 6 million people have left the labor market since 2008. Of those, nearly three-quarters — 4.4 million people — left for cyclical reasons.

  CBS News | May 7, 2013

• April jobs report: Hiring picks up

  “This is a classic ‘hold-steady’ report — enough job growth to keep the unemployment rate stable but not much more,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “In good times, this would be fine, but at a time like this, it represents an ongoing disaster.”

  CNNMoney | May 7, 2013

• McJobs recovery continues in latest job figures

  At the current rate of job growth, “it will take more than five years to return to the prerecession unemployment rate,” according to a note from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz. But the shape of the recovery matters just as much as the pace, and that’s where BLS indicators become even more alarming. As the United States plods its way out of recession, it appears to be completing its transformation into a McJobs economy.

  MSNBC | May 7, 2013

• Many job openings, fewer hires

  Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says the hiring data suggests that some industries may have a skills gap, but the overall labor market has a different problem. 

  “It’s just that we don’t have demand for work to be done,” she says. “What you find is that unemployed workers vastly outnumber job openings in every single industry.”

  Marketplace | May 7, 2013

• WHY THE US ECONOMY IS TAKING SO LONG TO RECOVER

  Account for population growth, and the jobs ditch is even deeper: Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says the economy needs to add 8.6 million jobs, not 2.6 million, to keep up with a rising population.

  AP | May 7, 2013

• Recession has widened racial wealth gap, report says

  This hits home in Minneapolis, where black unemployment was estimated at 27 percent in 2011 by the Economic Policy Institute. Also, home prices in three of the city’s poorest sections — Camden, Near North, and Phillips — remain more than 60 percent below their pre-recession highs, according to the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors. Homes in north Minneapolis routinely are worth a third or a fourth of what people paid for them in 2005.

  Minneapolis Star Tribune | May 1, 2013

• What Do We Do About America’s Racial Wealth Gap?

  Algernon Austin, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, said that taken together, the difference between unemployment rates between different racial groups and their median incomes was just as big a contributing factor to the wealth gap as housing. The black unemployment rate has stayed north of 13 percent since the recession began, and many researchers say the number might be much higher.

  NPR | May 1, 2013

• CEO Pay 1,795-to-1 Multiple of Wages Skirts U.S. Law

  Because most companies don’t disclose average worker pay, the CEO compensation was divided by an estimate of industry-specific rank-and-file employee compensation calculated from government data. The methodology is based on one developed by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute for a 2012 study that focused on aggregate trends, not company-specific findings.

  Bloomberg | May 1, 2013

• CEO pay is more out of whack than ever: Top execs in the US earn an average of 204 times more than their rank-and-file employees — and that’s a conservative estimate.

  As The Guardian noted, American CEOs saw their pay jump 15% in 2011 after climbing 28% the year before. Not only did worker wages drop 2% in 2011, according to the Labor Department, but the Economic Policy Institute says CEO pay leaped 725% from 1978 to 2011 while worker pay rose just 5.7%. As The Huffington Post points out, CEOs continue to see their pay climb at three times the rate of those they employ.

  MSN Money | May 1, 2013

• Tech Talent Shortage? What Tech Talent Shortage? Read more at http://www.women2.com/tech-talent-shortage-what-tech-talent-shortage/#yIK15pgA8fjfIze8.99

  That’s the argument made by Jordan Weissman, an associate editor for The Atlantic, in a post appearing on Quartz recently. In it, Weissman rounds up new and existing research to show that actually the US is producing plenty of grads in necessary technical fields. He writes:

  That whole skills shortage? It’s a myth, as was amply illustrated (yet again) by a report this week from the Economic Policy Institute. It still might be the case that tech companies are having trouble finding specific skill sets in certain niches (think cloud software development, or Android programming), but there simply aren’t any signs pointing to a broad dearth of talent.

  Women 2.0 | May 1, 2013