Jason Furman

Slowdowns in the economy are inevitable. While it may be tempting to rely on Federal Reserve policy as a lone response to recessions, this would be a mistake; we know that fiscal stimulus is effective. Rather than wait for a crisis to strike before designing discretionary fiscal policy, we would be better served by preparing in advance. Enacting evidence-based automatic stabilizer proposals before the next recession will help the next recovery start faster, make job creation stronger, and restore confidence to businesses and households.

In the face of large declines in tax revenues and increased demand for state programs during and after recessions, state governments are often forced to raise taxes, cut programs, or both. In order to protect state Medicaid programs and counteract recessions, Matthew Fiedler, Jason Furman, and Wilson Powell III propose to automatically increase the federal share of expenditures under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program when a state’s unemployment rate exceeds a threshold level.

On September 28, The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution hosted a forum to explore the most effective policy options to foster place-based policies for shared economic growth.

On September 26, The Hamilton Project at Brookings hosted a forum on wage growth in The United States. The forum explored several key questions, including: What can and should be done to promote the economic growth that will lead to higher earnings for more American workers? How do we ensure that these gains are broadly shared, resulting in robust wage growth for as many workers as possible? In conjunction with this event, The Hamilton Project released a new framing paper exploring wage trends and their underlying economic determinants that underlie them.

The last decade’s decline in productivity—coupled with very low interest rates and declining public investment—presents a challenge and an opportunity for economic policy. In response, many policymakers and experts have proposed investments in public infrastructure, raising questions about which types of infrastructure projects are worth pursuing and how to finance them effectively. On February 7, The Hamilton Project hosted a policy forum exploring fiscally responsible policy options for funding and financing infrastructure investments.

Following the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, many observers have agreed that new and forward-thinking policy solutions are needed to confront the enduring economic challenges in health care and health insurance markets. On October 7, The Hamilton Project hosted a policy forum addressing these economic challenges in an evolving health care market. The Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman delivered framing remarks.

On July 17, THP hosted CEA Chairman Jason Furman to discuss a new report on opportunities & challenges in the U.S. labor market. Furman was joined by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and economist Alan Blinder of Princeton University for a roundtable discussion.

More than half of American families earn $60,000 or less a year — outside of poverty but with limited economic security. Many of these families rely on government programs for support and one major setback could throw their lives into chaos. On December 4th, The Hamilton Project hosted a forum to highlight two new proposals for aiding America’s lower middle class families featuring a diverse range of experts.

Today, too many Americans are not fully sharing in our nation’s prosperity. This paper outlines the ways in which promoting economic growth, broad-based participation in growth, and economic security can be mutually reinforcing policy objectives.

Jason Furman discusses the issue of missing markets for both societal and individual risk, highlighting reasons for the absence of these markets and proposing solutions to enable the development of new markets.

The Hamilton Project hosted a discussion on what the government can do to foster market-based solutions to major risks. Markets that could potentially mitigate or reduce some of the biggest risks faced by the American people and their broader communities are nonexistent or underutilized.

David Lewis outlined his new Hamilton Project paper on the merits and potential barriers to congestion pricing as a tool for combating urban gridlock at an event co-sponsored with the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.