- On Capitol Hill
- On Wall Street
- In the Press
- Policy Reform Work
Our projects are designed to empower policy makers to create positive change. With a focus on collaboration and outreach, we provide original, standards-based research on key policy issues.
SCEPA joined with the Economic Policy Institute on Capitol Hill to brief congressional staff and policy experts on tax expenditures, or incentives given through the tax code without scrutiny by Congress.
SCEPA economists are working on the prospects for a more progressive economic order to emerge from the shock of the recession. They have published papers and documents that place current events in a longer-term context as well as policy proposals to deal with short-term concerns. They are also documenting the emerging discussion of how the discipline of economics is reacting to the Great Recession and the questioning of conventional economic analysis.
Lance Taylor, a SCEPA Faculty Fellow, presents an overview of his new book, Maynard’s Revenge, in a Google Tech Talk.
The book, published this November by Harvard University Press, is a timely analysis of mainstream macroeconomics, posing the need for a more useful and realistic economic analysis that can provide a better understanding of the ongoing global financial and economic crisis.
The government spends $143 billion through tax breaks in an effort to expand pension coverage and security. Yet, over half of the American workforce does not have a pension. Retirement insecurity hurts business plans, workers’ lives and retiree well-being. Reform is needed.
SCEPA’s Guaranteeing Retirement Income Project, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and in collaboration with Demos and the Economic Policy Institute, has a plan to guarantee safe and secure retirement income for all Americans.
"The Failure of the 401(k)" to be featured on The Brian Lehrer Show
Next week, The Brian Lehrer Show will be focusing on public and private pensions and alternatives to the current retirement saving systems. As part of their series, they will be speaking with two representatives of SCEPA's Guaranteed Retirement Income Project. On Tuesday, March 15th, SCEPA Director Teresa Ghilarducci will be joining the show to discuss public pensions. On Wednesday, March 16th, Robert Hiltonsmith, policy analyst at Demos, our project partner, will be discussing the findings of his recent report "The Failure of the 401(k)."
The Brian Lehrer show broadcasts in New York on FM and AM from 10a.m. to noon and worldwide on the web at www.wnyc.org.
New York Times: Making the Most Out of Less
Today's New York Times features a supplement on retirement. It leads with an article by Steven Greenhouse, who provides a straightforward assessment of what retirees at all ages face: "This year, the first of the nation's 79 million baby boomers turn 65, and while millions dream of comfortable retirements, perhaps in Boca Raton, Fla., or Palm Springs, Calif., many will discover they will have a tough time in retirement.
'The baby boomers will be the first generation that will do worse in retirement than their parents,' said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor and retirement specialist at the New School for Social Research in New York. 'And the next generation of retirees will do a lot worse; they fall off a cliff,' largely because so few of them will have the traditional pensions that many of their parents and grandparents had."
Dynamics of Output and Employment in the U.S. Economy
The new paper by Deepankar Basu and Duncan K. Foley investigates the changing relationship between employment and real output in the U.S. economy from 1948 to 2010 both at the aggregate level and at some major industry-grouping levels of disaggregation. Real output is conventionally measured as value added corrected for price inflation, but there are some industries in which no independent measure of value added is possible and existing statistics depend on imputing value added to equal income. Indexes of output that exclude these imputations are closely correlated with employment over the whole period, and remain more closely correlated during the current business cycle. This analysis offers insights into deeper structural changes that have taken place in the U.S. economy over the past few decades in a context marked by the following three factors: (i) the service (especially the financial) sector has grown in importance, (ii) the economy has become more globalized, and (iii) the policy orientation has increasingly become neoliberal. We demonstrate an economically significant reduction in the coefficient relating employment growth to output growth over the business cycles since 1985. Some of this change is due to sectoral shifts toward services, but an important part of it reflects a reduction in the coefficient for the goods and material value-adding sectors.
