Immigration by Category: Workers, Students, Family Members, Asylum Applicants

This briefing examines immigration by category. The analysis distinguishes between European and non-European migrants and among four basic types: work, study, family and asylum

Measuring short-run inflation for central bankers - commentary

Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy ; Banks and banking, Central

Teaching Macro Principles after the Financial Crisis

The stunning events of 2007-2009 both shook the world and piqued interest in economics. In the 30-plus years that I have been teaching macro principles, I have never seen the level of interest in students as high as what I observed last year rapt attention and no sleepers! Interest in economics has grown, and our students will want, expect, and deserve explanations of these events for years to come. This is truly a teaching moment, and that moment is going to be a long one. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the current curriculum fails to give students even imperfect answers. This means that the macro principles course will have to be changed. Although we can’t provide beginning students with complete answers, we can do a lot better than we have been doing.macroeconomics, financial crisis, economic curriculums in schools

How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?

Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 BLS occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work— either physically or electronically. Using that ranking, I estimate that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all U.S. jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two. (I make no estimate of how many jobs will actually be offshored.) Since my rankings are subjective, two alternatives are presented—one is entirely objective, the other is an independent subjective ranking. It is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation’s “offshorability” and the skill level of its workers (as measured either by educational attainment or wages). However, it appears that, controlling for education, the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004.

Education for the Third Industrial Revolution

At the risk of sounding like a crass economist, I want to assert at the outset that one major purpose of the K-12 educational system is “vocational” in the broad sense. Specifically, the K-12 system is a mechanism for preparing cadres of 18-year-olds (many of whom will get some higher education first) to perform the tasks needed and remunerated by the U.S. job market (or of being easily trained to do so). To be sure, this narrowly economic purpose of mass public education is not the only reason to educate America’s youth; an educated citizenry presumably has other social benefits as well. But I believe it is an important purpose and, in any case, it is the perspective that guides this essay. Any reader who does not accept this initial premise can stop reading right now. My second, and much more controversial, premise is that the needs of the U.S. economy are changing (that’s not the controversial part) in ways that are at least somewhat predictable (that is the controversial part). To be sure, I am not foolish enough to believe that we can predict in detail the mix of jobs that will be available in the United States in, say, 2028 or 2038 and then fine-tune the educational system to meet those demands. But I think at least two broad trends are clearly foreseeable.