Insights Blog
The New School Economics Department's COVID-19 Policy Forum
A compendium of economic thoughts and policy recommendations in response to the coronavirus.
Reset Retirement, a new podcast from our Retirement Equity Lab, tells the real stories of retirement.
SCEPA's working paper on the costs of the city's Hudson Yards project was featured in the New York Times, New York 1, Gothamist, New York Magazine's Intelligencer, CityLab, the Guardian, and a New York Post editorial, among others. The article below was featured in Urban Matters, a publication of the Center for New York City Affairs.
SCEPA Economist and New School Professor Duncan Foley receives the 2017 Guggenheim Prize in Economics for “major contribution to the field.”
Willi Semmler, director of SCEPA's Economics of Climate Change Project and economics professor at The New School, spent his summer in Laxenburg and Vienna working in a new role as senior researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) on climate change issues. The IIASA is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, climate change, inequality, poverty, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Currently, the IIASA is the main research center investigating the urgent question of how to act to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
Professor Semmler’s research this summer investigated green bonds, the transition to a low-carbon economy, and intergenerational fairness. He gave a talk in a workshop at the IIASA sharing the research results and worked on a research proposal entitled, "Enabling Investment for Fair Climate Policies."
Due to lack of coverage and a systemic reliance on defined contribution plans, workers do not have enough saved for retirement.
What is the “retirement wealth inequality machine?”
Only a power and resource shift from capital to labor can reverse the entrenched trends of inequality.
Time’s Money Magazine features recent research led by ReLab Director Teresa Ghilarducci on the damaging effects of income shocks on retirement savings in, “Here's How Much a Job Loss Now Will Cost You by Retirement.”
Income shocks are pervasive, with 96 percent of Americans experiencing at least four in their working years. For example, a drop of 10 percent or more four times in your life can reduce retirement savings by $25,000 on average. This average is higher for low-income Americans, whereas wealthier Americans have healthy emergency funds to draw from. Ghilarducci challenges the notion that the retirement crisis is due to poor savings habits. Less privileged Americans have few options when unexpected hardship hits before retirement.
About SCEPA
SCEPA works to focus the public economics debate on the role government can and should play in the real productive economy - that of business, management, and labor - to raise living standards, create economic security, and attain full employment.
