Plenty of workers still move West each year for a new job in California. But the state’s high cost of housing may be deterring many other job seekers from moving into the state. Business leaders up and down the state say California’s expensive housing makes it challenging to recruit new workers — and to keep […]
The table above shows the number of bachelor’s degrees by major field of study and gender for the College Class of 2016, ranked by the female share of each field (based on recently released Department of Education data here). A few observations: 1. Overall, women earned 57.34% of all bachelor’s degrees in 2016, which means […]
States have the authority to make online retailers collect sales taxes, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, opening a new chapter in economic history where e-commerce is treated as a mature player in a marketplace that is no longer defined by trips to the corner store or the shopping mall. By a 5-to-4 vote, the court […]
The U.S. shale boom kicked off with natural gas a decade ago, and dry gas production is expected to keep surging by another 60 percent during the next 20 years, according to a new report Wednesday. While much of the shale focus is now on oil production in West Texas, it all started with natural […]
The surge of retiring baby boomers is reshaping the U.S. into a country with fewer workers to support the elderly—a shift that will add to strains on retirement programs such as Social Security and sharpen the national debate on the role of immigration in the workforce. For most of the past few decades, the ratio […]
Economic confidence among lower-income Americans has taken a recent leap, the latest evidence that benefits of the economic expansion are reaching a broader swath of workers. Sentiment among lower-income consumers still trails that of their higher-earning counterparts. But the gap has narrowed in recent months. In the University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment index, confidence among households […]
The California economy cooled a bit in May as employers added just 5,500 net jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at a record low of 4.2%, according to data released Friday by the state’s Employment Development Department. The numbers reflect a slowdown from April, when the state added 25,600 jobs, according to Friday’s downward revision. […]
There are multiple reasons for this union effect. Collective bargaining agreements often standardize wage rates across similar occupations doing similar tasks, and establish objective procedures for hiring and awarding raises and promotions. Unions can narrow the wage gap between workers with different skills; they can also increase skill levels by providing high-quality apprenticeships and other […]
Unions have historically played a role in improving wages and benefits by enabling workers to join together to negotiate with employers. Recent research finds a persistent positive effect of unions on members’ wages and household income (Farber et al. 2018). On their own, individual workers have little bargaining power with employers. When bargaining together, workers […]
When the California Housing Finance Agency was created in 1975 in Governor Jerry Brown’s first term, the mission was simple: help low- and moderate-income families buy their first home. More than 40 years later, amid skyrocketing housing prices and near-record low homeownership rates, that goal is getting harder and harder to attain. So much so […]
The Bay Area’s growing manufacturing sector is often portrayed as the region’s last best chance to bring back some of the well-paying, blue-collar jobs that have been disappearing for decades. But entrepreneurs at the forefront of the so-called “modern maker” movement — nimble boutique companies crafting everything from robots and drones to custom eyeglasses and […]
For most Americans, access to decent, affordable rental housing remains cruelly beyond reach. Only in 22 counties in the United States is a one-bedroom home affordable to someone working 40 hours per week at federal minimum wage. That’s from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) report, which outlines the mismatch between wages and rent […]
Even assuming that California avoids a long-overdue economic downturn, where would Newsom get the immense sums of money that he’d need to deliver his agenda? Just providing “guaranteed health care for all” would cost at least $100 billion more in taxes on someone, according to analyses of a single-payer measure that passed the Senate before […]
The speculative fever for electric-car metals is pushing to nearly four-year highs prices for nickel—a key ingredient in stainless steel. Nickel is the top industrial metal and among the best-performing assets of 2018, with futures contracts on the London Metal Exchange up 21%, as battery manufacturers, mostly in China, and investors across the world hoard […]
Global spending on renewable energy is outpacing investment in electricity from coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants, driven by falling costs of producing wind and solar power. More than half of the power-generating capacity added around the world in recent years has been in renewable sources such as wind and solar, according to the […]