Policy recommendations to deal with the immediacy of the coronavirus recession

Hipple: Given the reality of how disparate both the health and the economic impacts of the coronavirus are, what are some recommendations you would have for policymakers to address these issues? In particular, what are policies they need to be thinking of that they might not be thinking of if they’re unaware of these disparities and the historical inequalities that they’re stemming from?
Logan: Well, one those policies has to be an aggressive move to do testing. Doing so is going to prevent the spread of this virus from getting worse and is going to have a positive impact on African Americans because they’re disproportionally affected. We must have aggressive testing.

Two recently released reports by the Joint Economic Committee and the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee echo the disturbing media reports that Americans of color, particularly African Americans, are disproportionately contracting and dying of COVID-19, the disease spread by the new coronavirus. As the reports make clear, these racial disparities are driven by the longstanding structural economic and racial inequalities in the United States, and if action is not taken, both the virus and the economic recession it has triggered will only further exacerbate these structural inequalities.
Not all states and localities are making available coronavirus data disaggregated by race, but among those that are, there is a pattern of both positive COVID-19 cases and deaths

Policymakers have asked—in some cases, demanded—that people stay home and businesses shutter as a public health crisis has unfolded across the United States, inducing an economic downturn. Despite positive developments in legislation passed last week, those policymakers have not put in place all the steps needed to protect workers and businesses from a full-scale recession that may cast a shadow for years to come. Given the likely scope and scale of this crisis and the current public policy response—which, from both a public health and economic perspective, has been insufficient—it is looking increasingly likely that the United States may be on the cusp of a severe economic recession.
What does the evidence from the Great Recession of 2007–2009 say about what an extended recession

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
Household income in the United States has steadily become more volatile over the past several decades, even among those headed by college-educated people. Nisha Chikhale digs in on what’s behind this rise in household insecurity and its implications for overall economic growth and macroeconomic stability in a new report and accompanying issue brief.
Does raising the U.S. minimum wage

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
This past Tuesday was Tax Day, and next year when Americans file their taxes they’ll see some of the changes made by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in action, such as the higher standard deduction. People aren’t waiting that long to assess the effects of last year’s tax bill, though, with supporters of it already pointing to signs of its success. How should one actually assess the economic

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
The United States needs progressive tax policies that will support increased investment in children, infrastructure, and public health, argue Heather Boushey and Greg Leiserson in a recent op-ed in Democracy.
As the unemployment rate has fallen over the past several years, inflation has remained subdued. Whether that relationship between unemployment and inflation—measured by the

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
 
Equitable Growth round-up
 
This week, Stanford University economist and Equitable Growth Steering Committee Member Raj Chetty and fellow researchers Nathaniel Hendren at Harvard University and Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter at the U.S. Census Bureau released a new research paper entitled “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective.” Equitable Growth’s Liz Hipple

Stanford economist and Equitable Growth Steering Committee Member Raj Chetty and fellow researchers Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter released a new research paper yesterday, titled “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective.” The paper analyzes the impact of race on intergenerational mobility, that is, the chances that children will earn more—or less—than their parents when they grow up.
The paper is the latest from Chetty and his fellow researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project to examine the relationship between inequality, mobility, and opportunity in the United States. Equitable Growth thought its release was a good opportunity to revisit some of the key research findings of the project through seven

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
This week’s release in Equitable Growth’s Working Paper Series argues that an increase in monopoly power, together with a decline in interest rates, is the answer to five “puzzles” that have emerged in U.S. economic data over the past 40 years. The five closely related trends include the outpacing of capital investment by financial wealth, and the simultaneous decline of the labor share

In a new working paper for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Working Paper series, Equitable Growth grantee Daniel Carpenter and his co-author Brian Libgober at Harvard University seek to quantify the benefits to businesses of lobbying. Specifically, they examine the benefits of “lobbying with lawyers” via the participation of these businesses in the rulemaking process through commenting on regulatory agencies’ proposed rules.
The popular conception of lobbying usually focuses on the lawmaking stage in Congress, but an underappreciated but perhaps more influential stage is the rulemaking process. “Congressional statutes often leave to administrative agencies the essential tasks of specifying content or clarifying statutory meanings,” Carpenter and Libgober observe in their

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
In a follow-up to the Tax Foundation’s response to Greg Leiserson’s analysis of its model for estimating the economic growth effects of tax cuts, Leiserson explains why the Tax Foundation’s model still isn’t internally consistent and why policymakers should regard its results with skepticism.
This week’s release in Equitable Growth’s Working Paper Series shows that as occupational tasks

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) today is hosting a press conference with workers and advocates for fair scheduling practices to highlight her legislation, the Schedules That Work Act. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is the sponsor of the companion bill in the Senate. The legislation is intended to address the unpredictable and inconsistent workplace schedules that affect about 17 percent of U.S. workers, particularly among low-income workers in retail and service-industry jobs. The proposed legislation, for example, would require employers to provide workers with their schedules two weeks in advance and compensate workers who are sent home from a scheduled shift because there’s not enough work for them that day.
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth has spent a lot of time studying the

This is a weekly post we usually publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth, but in honor of Veterans’ Day tomorrow we’re publishing a day early this week. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
House Republicans’ tax plan will not spur innovation and job creation as promised, argue University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabrial Zucman, because it benefits passive business owners, not active entrepreneurs.
With all the attention garnered by Amazon.com Inc.’s recent

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. 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.
Equitable Growth round-up
Tax reform is unlikely to benefit workers, argues Kimberly Clausing. Cutting corporate tax rates is an indirect mechanism with no guarantee it will translate into higher wages for workers, versus cuts to payroll and labor income tax cuts.
The release this week of the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report on income and poverty underscores why better official measures of economic inequality