Category: Blogging

How Immigration Policy Shapes Labor Markets

Immigration and the Workforce: More Than a Headline Immigration policy rarely stays out of the news, yet the conversation almost always flattens into bumper-sticker territory. Some voices claim immigrants swipe jobs from native-born workers; others fire back that …

What Really Happens When Immigration Policy Hits the Labor Market

Immigration policy doesn’t float in some tidy vacuum. Change a visa category, tighten a border rule, open a path to citizenship, and you send tremors through the labor market—sometimes shoring up whole industries, sometimes undercutting wages in ways …

How Immigration Policy Shapes Labor Markets: The Evidence from Sectors, Wages, and Innovation

Immigration policy rarely stays confined to the border. For economists and policy analysts, it’s a lever on the labor market—one that can widen or narrow the supply of workers, nudge wage floors up or down, and redirect where …

Why Student Debt Policy Cannot Ignore Racial Wealth Gaps

When Congress argues about canceling student loans, capping interest rates, or tweaking income-driven repayment plans, the debate usually starts from a single premise: college costs too much, and graduates can’t keep up with their payments. That’s not false, …

The Case for Converting Commercial Real Estate to Housing

Walk through almost any American downtown and you’ll see it: half-empty office towers, shuttered storefronts, lobbies that feel more like museums than workplaces. Remote work hasn’t just dented demand for office space—it’s gutted it, while e-commerce keeps chewing …

Why Labor Policy Lags Behind Economic Reality

Why Labor Policy Lags Behind Economic Reality By Declan Osei More than a third of U.S. workers—36 percent, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2023 count—now patch together a living through freelancing, temping, on-call shifts, and platform gigs. …

The Frozen Contract: Why Labor Policy Lags Behind Economic Reality

Walk into any co-working space on a Tuesday morning. You’ll find graphic designers invoicing clients across three continents, software developers collaborating asynchronously from different time zones, and freelance strategists piecing together a living from half a dozen platforms. …

The Problem With Means-Tested Benefits That Create Poverty Traps

When Helping Hurts: The Hidden Architecture of Poverty Traps Declan Osei here. For decades, policymakers have built safety nets around a tidy, straightforward idea: send help to the people who need it most. Means-tested benefits—programs that shrink as …