Jimmy O’Donnell

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the United States with a set of unique public health and economic challenges. Economically, the crisis has negatively affected businesses, the labor market, and households. In this set of 10 facts, Wendy Edelberg, Kristen Broady, Lauren Bauer, and Jimmy O’Donnell assess the extent of these economic damages and provide an overview of existing policy interventions.  

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of essential workers are confronting new public health hazards in their workplace. Yet because of mass de-unionization over the past 40 years, most of these workers lack union representation. In this blog, Jimmy O'Donnell builds upon prior Hamilton Project work, shows how workplace conditions have changed for workers, and discusses the potential role for private-sector labor unions.

Since the March Employment Situation, the number of respondents reporting as "employed but absent from work due to other reasons" has risen as a share of the labor force. In this blog, Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, Jimmy O'Donnell, and Jay Shambaugh explore the nature and magnitude of this phenomenon and analyze who these "potentially misclassified" respondents are.

In this analysis, Ryan Nunn, Jimmy O'Donnell, and Jay Shambaugh consider several policy options that could help boost workers’ wages. The authors also provide a categorization of which workers qualify as essential—performing functions society urgently needs that must be done in person—and then detail their incomes and their demographic characteristics.

This blog post explores two important labor market disadvantages observed for nontraditional workers: more volatile hours and less health insurance coverage.

In 2017, over 15 million workers (about 10 percent of the total U.S. workforce) were in alternative work arrangements. In this economic analysis, Ryan Nunn and Jimmy O'Donnell explore the characteristics of these workers, analyze their unique economic outcomes, and assess policy reforms that can help provide more security for these workers.

The Hamilton Project finds that the decline in private sector union membership is economically important for the future of labor. Unions can lift wages, reduce inequality and shape how work is organized, among other effects.

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.

Automatic stabilizers are designed to expand during an economic downturn and contract during an expansion—providing timely and temporary fiscal stimulus. Boushey, Nunn, O’Donnell, and Shambaugh assess the various policy responses available to the federal government and argues that when well designed, automatic stabilizers can be an effective part of the policy tool kit for responding to recessions. 

In this framing paper, Ryan Nunn, Jimmy O'Donnell, and Jay Shambaugh evaluate the potential labor market impacts of several employment support policies, with particular attention devoted to a federal job guarantee. They conclude that while a job guarantee could lift employment rates and incomes for many participants, its effects on the currently employed and those out of the labor force are very uncertain.

Immigration has wide-ranging impacts on society and culture, and its economic effects are no less substantial. This document provides a set of economic facts about the role of immigration in the U.S. economy, describing the patterns of recent immigration (levels, legal status, country of origin, and U.S. state of residence), the characteristics of immigrants (education, occupations, and employment), and the effects of immigration on the economy (economic output, wages, innovation, fiscal resources, and crime).