Weekend reading

This is a weekly post we publish every Friday with links to articles we think anyone interested in equitable growth should read. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week we can put them in context.

Housing costs

Jeff Guo on the “shadow” price of housing and the places where housing is more expensive than you would expect. [storyline (opens in a new tab)]

The variation in overall prices across the United States appear to be driven almost entirely by regional differences in housing costs. [squarely rooted (opens in a new tab)]

Labor market searches

What do employers look at when hiring recent college graduates? Surprisingly it’s not grades. It’s internships. [the atlantic (opens in a new tab)]

Different sources of income, different trends

Neil Irwin on the gains that middle-income households have seen over the past 5 years, or rather the gains they haven’t seen. [the upshot (opens in a new tab)]

Izabella Kaminska on how patent trolls are the new rentier class. [ft alphaville (opens in a new tab)]

Economic modeling

Search models work well for the labor market. They also can make sense of different goods and product markets and can help us better understand the causes of recessions. [mainly macro (opens in a new tab)]