Disaggregated data on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders is crucial amid the coronavirus pandemic
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Overview The novel coronavirus pandemic and the recession it caused lay bare the clear links between racial and ethnic economic inequities, structural racism, and the outsized harm of these crises on communities of color in the United States. But the impact on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and…
Building worker power in the United States
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Wages have stagnated for most U.S. workers over the past 40 years while the labor market institutions that promote worker power have faltered in a pro-business and anti-worker policy environment. These two phenomena are two sides of the same coin—productivity decoupled from wage growth results in em…
Improving automatic stabilizers to combat U.S. economic recessions
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The new coronavirus pandemic and the recession it caused show that the typical set of economic policies used to fight recessions in the United States should be designed to automatically turn on and off in a downturn. It is impossible to predict when the economy will fall into a recession and, on the…
Addressing the U.S. racial economic mobility and inequality divides
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Economic mobility in the United States has been declining over the past half-century at the same time that economic inequality has been rising. Research by Harvard University economist and former Equitable Growth Steering Committee member Raj Chetty and his co-authors shows that rates of absolute in…
Reforming Unemployment Insurance across the United States
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Longstanding problems with the Unemployment Insurance system in the United States are immediately evident amid the coronavirus recession and echo the problems experienced during the Great Recession more than a decade ago. These include: Administrative failures at state Unemployment Insurance agencie…
Most recent JOLTS release provides latest data on how the coronavirus recession is different from the Great Recession
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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics today released its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for the month of June. Also known as JOLTS, the survey collects data on job openings, hires, layoffs, quits, and other separations between workers and employers, providing information on the labor m…
July jobs report: Coronavirus recession continues to hit Latinx workers in service jobs amid unprecedented U.S. labor market volatility
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With novel coronavirus infections still rising in many states, an ongoing squeeze on already hard-hit workers and businesses, and uncertainty about the federal government’s next economic relief package, July’s Employment Situation Summary by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the labor m…
Gaps in U.S. rural and urban economic growth widened in the post-Great Recession economy, with implications amid the coronavirus recession
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Overview Prior to the current coronavirus recession, most U.S. economic metrics pointed to a slow but steady nationwide recovery amid an 11-year post-Great Recession run of economic growth. But prosperity was not spread equally across the breadth of the nation. In addition to widening income and wea…
Twenty-one policy resources to combat the coronavirus recession
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Policymakers learned late last week that the U.S. economy registered a stunning 9.4 percent contraction in the second quarter of this year, a drop not experienced since the Great Depression more than eight decades ago. And that extraordinarily bad news came in late July—following weeks of the novel…
Testimony by Heather Boushey before the Joint Economic Committee on the Coronavirus Recession
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Heather Boushey Washington Center for Equitable Growth Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, Hearing on “Reducing Uncertainty and Restoring Confidence During the Coronavirus Recession” July 30, 2020 Thank you, Vice Chair Beyer and Chairman Lee, for inviting me to speak today. It’s an honor…