Blog

Stephanie Aaronson, Mitchell Barnes, and Wendy Edelberg discuss the benefits and potential limitations of promoting a tight labor market to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in unemployment rates.

In a new analysis from The Hamilton Project, Lauren Bauer explores how the 2021 revision of the Thrifty Food plan will support families currently facing food insecurity and economic hardship.

From May-December 2020, working moms with kid(s) 12 and under spent more weekday hours on child care than working.

In a new blog, Ryan Nunn outlines reforms to occupational licensing and non-compete contracts that would boost labor market competition and benefit workers.

In a new blog, Elizabeth Lee, Sophia Mariam, Este Griffith, Robert Greenstein explore the role of social insurance and highlight policy proposals for reforms that would make vital and lasting improvements to the U.S. social insurance system.  

In a new blog, Mitchell Barnes, Mark Booth, Wendy Edelberg, and Sara Estep analyze data from the Daily Treasury Statements and examine the impact of the recession on households and business owners across the income distribution.

Lauren Bauer, Arindrajit Dube, Wendy Edelberg, and Aaron Sojourner explore the factors leading to slower-than-expected employment gains during the post-COVID economic recovery as well as circumstances holding people back from participating in the labor force.  

In a new blog, Bob Greenstein outlines the future of the Child Tax Credit, and examines how the American Family Plan can help make this credit permanent. 

In a new blog, Lauren Bauer provides new evidence that mothers — particularly mothers of children under five and unmarried mothers — are being left behind in the economic recovery from COVID-19. 

In this analysis, Jay Shambaugh provides evidence to help interpret forthcoming releases of inflation data as they begin to capture the impact of the COVID-19 downturn.

In this analysis, we examine the impacts of the pandemic recession across different dimensions, including employment, labor force participation, and the need to switch industries. This analysis provides texture and evidence to the emerging understanding that women and people of color, working in the service industry, have been the most negatively affected.

Ten Senate Republicans recently proposed a $618-billion COVID relief package. In this piece, we provide an analysis of that package and update our analysis of the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion fiscal package, using the current-law GDP projections that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released on Monday.  

In this piece, Wendy Edelberg and Louise Sheiner project the effect of the Biden package on GDP. They project that if the Biden package were enacted, GDP would reach the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) pre-pandemic GDP projection after the third quarter of 2021, exceeding it by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. In the middle of 2022, GDP would show a temporary and shallow decline and then grow at an annual rate of about 1.5 percent, coming close to the path projected just before the pandemic.

In this analysis, Kristen Broady, Eliana Buckner, Jennifer Umanzor, and Sarah Wheaton find that while nearly every school in our sample offered in-person experiences in March, only about 30 percent were planning to maintain that in-person experience by September. Public schools and community colleges were particularly likely to go online, which disproportionately impacted students of color as well as low-income students.

In this analysis, Wendy Edelberg and Stephanie Lu examine the benefits of social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance, rental assistance, and subsidized health insurance. They recommend improving automatic stabilizers so that ad hoc policymaking in the face of an economic downturn becomes the exception, rather than the rule. 

To conclude the year, Alexandra Contreras, Elizabeth Lee, and Stephanie Lu present here a month-by-month journey in figures through The Hamilton Project’s research, analysis, and policy proposals.

Using updated data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for 2019, the authors of this blog find that the Black-white wealth gap present heading into the COVID-19 pandemic leaves Black households with far fewer resources to weather the storm.

Although Congress' extraordinary measures early in the pandemic created income streams for millions of unemployed workers, they will not continue into 2021 without further congressional action. With the help of an interactive, Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, and Stephanie Lu discuss the negative consequences of allowing unemployment benefits to lapse at the end of 2020.

In this analysis, Lauren Bauer provides evidence of an ongoing food insecurity crisis in the United States and current evidence on household food insecurity and very low food insecurity among children by child age.

In this analysis, Aaronson and Edelberg find evidence of structural damage in the monthly employment data. Early in the pandemic, most workers who lost jobs were laid off temporarily, as businesses expected to reopen and recall their workers.

This analysis shows the effects on economic activity, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), of illustrative versions of several policies. Specifically, researchers examine five policies: a second round of checks to households, a resumption of enhanced unemployment insurance benefits, aid to state and local governments, support for small businesses, and other forms of fiscal support.

In this analysis, we present two data interactives that let you explore how trends in teen labor force participation and school enrollment during the academic year and the summer have changed in the past 20 years (2000 to 2020) and across the United States in 2020, by gender and race.