Skip to main content

Research Archive

Welcome to Our Research Archive

Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword

July 2, 2025

Have You Heard the Good News?

…the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021. Real income grew more for low-income households than for the median household. The inflation-adjusted wealth of families…

December 17, 2024

Industrial Policy and Deficits: Dark Clouds for Democratic Capitalism

…robustly for workers of all education levels. Median household income has never been higher. At $80,610 in 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), nominal median household…

October 15, 2024

Why Should the US Wish to Be More Like China?

…works because their economy is embedded in an authoritarian state with a compliant industrial sector. Rather than uniting our allies, the protectionist policies of the Trump and Biden administrations have…

October 9, 2024

Learning the Right Lessons from the “China Shock”

…the extent that adverse effects on import-competing workers created Keynesian aggregate-demand reductions, post-2007 economic slack was a major contributor. The paper is well titled: “Protectionism is Failing and Wrongheaded: An…

September 10, 2024

Event: New Census Data on American Families’ Economic Well-Being

…AEI’s Kevin Corinth began by summarizing the data’s main findings. Median household income rose, and the official poverty measure (OPM) showed that poverty declined while the supplemental poverty measure (SPM)…

December 18, 2023

The State of Democratic Capitalism: 2023

…— six years after the financial crisis — for the median inflation-adjusted wages to return to its level in 2007 level. For six years, over half of workers lost ground. It is…

December 14, 2023

The Myth of the 1%

…and more women have entered the workforce. This considerable improvement in Americans’ well-being is more striking than the share of income accruing to the country’s highest earners. Compare a median-income household to…

December 15, 2022

The Myth of Income Stagnation

…confirm that the conventional wisdom is off-base. According to the CBO, median household income from market activities – labor, business, and capital income, as well as retirement income from past…