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Trumped up expectations continue to revert: Highlights The economy is solid, at least the service sector, but on the whole is losing momentum, based on Markit’s flash data for June. The composite PMI slowed to 53.0 vs Econoday’s consensus for 53.8 with services also at 53.0 and manufacturing at 52.1, both short of expectations. Services offer the best news with new orders and employment solid and optimism on the outlook particularly positive. In a special sign of strength,...

From Robert F. Hoxie, Trade Unionism in the United States, 1917: There is much scorn of unionists by economists and employers because of this lump of labor theory with its corollaries. This scorn is based on the classical supply and demand theory and its variants. Supply is demand. Increased efficiency in production means an increase of social dividend and increased shares, which in turn increase production and saving. Therefore, the workers cut off their...

from Jamie Morgan Understanding Brexit requires us to consider the political economy of tax justice and the abuse of wealth protection. At a time when a general election has dominated the press for the last two months and Brexit has been a shadow of anxiety – a most remarkable event that the political parties have been steadfastly refusing to remark upon in any meaningful way – it is important to recall just how we got to the current state of affairs; a state that Craig Berry refers to as...

from David Ruccio When I ask my students that question, they don’t really have an answer. That’s because, like much of the rest of the U.S. population, they don’t have much experience with unions, either directly or indirectly—not when the union membership rate has fallen to below 11 percent nationwide and is only 6.4 percent in the private sector.   And if you pose that question to neoclassical economists, the response is: labor unions cause unemployment, by setting a wage rate that...

George Borjas, perhaps the US’ pre-eminent immigration economist notes: Maybe it’s just me because I instinctively read in between the lines whenever I read anything about immigration, but I’m beginning to detect such a seismic shift in the immigration debate. We all know the party line by now: Immigrants do jobs that natives don’t want to do. As a result, natives do not lose jobs, and natives do not see their wages reduced. And anyone who claims otherwise is...

from Lars Syll Source As we’ve noticed, again and again, correlation is not the same as causation … If you want to get the prize in economics — and want to be on the sure side — yours truly would suggest you complement  your intake of chocolate with a move to Chicago. Out of the 78 laureates that have been awarded “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” 28 have been affiliated to The University of Chicago — that is 36%. The world is really a small...

Going nowhere, and with mortgage lending decelerating not much hope this will add to growth vs last year: Highlights Housing has been sliding which adds importance to May’s very solid 1.1 percent rebound in existing home sales to a higher-than-expected 5.620 million annualized rate. Today’s report is mostly solid throughout and includes gains for single-family homes, up 1.0 percent to a 4.980 million rate, and also condos, up 1.6 percent to a 640,000 rate. The sales gains...

NYT has an interesting article that might provide readers with the details of not only immigration but labor, food supply, agriculture in a mixed reaction to such issues.  I also wonder if planting went smoothly, for instance, as the details of lives get lost in the simplicities of bumper sticker, all or none politics.  This is of course only one small sector of of an economy affected by immigration but sometimes a story offers much insight if I ask the right...

Here is a working paper by Leonie Gerhards and Michael Kosfeld entitled I (Don’t) Like You! But Who Cares? Gender Differences in Same Sex and Mixed Sex Teams. The abstract reads as follows: We study the effect of likability on female and male team behavior in a lab experiment. Extending a two-player public goods game and a minimum effort game by an additional pre-play stage that informs team members about their mutual likability we find that female teams...