“This fraud would have to be so widespread, to affect enough of the survey takers to affect the top-line numbers, that it seems implausible on the face of it,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies unemployment at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The 0.3-percent decline in unemployment in September 2012 was not an unusually large change, Shierholz pointed out — the unemployment rate tends to be volatile. Unemployment also fell by 0.3 percent in November 2011, less than a year earlier. September’s drop, though large, was not out of line with the overall trend in unemployment, which has continued to decline steadily, if slowly, in the year since the election.
The Huffington Post
November 20, 2013
According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, the economy would have needed to add about 90,000 jobs a month to keep up with the increase in the population since 2007. Based on this figure, the U.S. would have needed to add 8 million more jobs to provide for the number of people joining the workforce in the last six years.
CBS Moneywatch
November 20, 2013
So you have a crisis here. But the expiration will also have a real impact on the economy. The Economic Policy Institute has said the failure to extend the program would cost 310,000 jobs.
The Washington Post
November 20, 2013
The left-of-center Economic Policy Institute has estimated that the expiration of the emergency jobless benefits program would reduce job growth by 310,000 positions next year because consumers over all would have less money to spend. Michael Feroli, chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase, has estimated that it would drain about four-tenths of a percentage point from first-quarter economic growth.
The Washington Post
November 19, 2013
That growth brought the total number of one-percenter households in the area to just under 54,000. You might be wondering: Who, exactly, are those people? How do they get their money? We wondered the same thing, and we asked the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank with a lot of experience studying the make-up of the 1 percent nationally, to help us figure it out. It analyzed detailed Census data and produced the charts you see below.
The Washington Post
November 19, 2013
Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and his colleagues have been on this research beat for a while: As Mr. Porter noted:
Mr. Mishel’s preferred explanation of inequality’s rise is institutional: a shrinking minimum wage cut into the earnings of the nation’s least-skilled workers while falling trade barriers, deregulation and the decline of labor unions eroded the income of the middle class. The rise of the top 1 percent, he believes, is mostly about executive pay and the growing footprint of finance.
The New York Times
November 19, 2013
A recent study by the Rand Corporation predicted out-of-pocket medical expenses will decline for most people who are newly insured or change their health plans. Then there are the almost nine million more people who will be covered by Medicaid, says Josh Bivens with the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Others will get subsidies to buy insurance.
“In my mind this is kind of like a delayed, small stimulus program, because it’s actually providing people who are otherwise cash-constrained to give them more income in the next couple years,” Bivens says.
Marketplace
November 19, 2013
It’s hard to say exactly how many of Washington’s households in the top 1 percent draw their incomes from the broad business of serving, supplying or influencing the government. But an analysis of tax data by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the area’s 1-percenters are most likely to be lawyers and executives, or people who work in management consulting or IT. Nearly 1 in 10 of those households is headed by a government worker.
The Washington Post
November 18, 2013
“It’s slowing the recovery from the recession because people have less money in their pockets to spend on goods and services provided by other businesses,” noted Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “These young people are delaying their saving for retirement, their ability to accrue capital to buy a home—all of the things a middle-class person does.
CNBC
November 18, 2013
While unemployment is a problem for both men and women, a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute found that although women fared better than men in the great recession that began in 2007, in the sense that more men lost their jobs than women did, during the economic recovery, men are seeing stronger gains in employment than women are. For example, while both men and women saw employment gains in the health care and social assistance sector, male employment grew by 50 percent more than female employment. As the author of the report, Hilary Wething explained, “While the jobs gap for men is larger than it is for women, men are nevertheless seeing strong gains than women within most industries.”
The Washington Post
November 18, 2013