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January 8, 2025

Menu Adjustment in Response to the Minimum Wage: A Return to the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Border

Abstract This paper studies how output prices are affected by increases in the minimum wage. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first examination of how the prices…

December 17, 2024

Industrial Policy and Deficits: Dark Clouds for Democratic Capitalism

Democratic capitalism is a system that marries liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. This union creates tensions, and requires balancing competing aims. But this tension is healthy, not destructive — provided…

October 18, 2024

Harris and Trump Are Equally Silent on the Expanding US Debt

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seem to agree that one of the nation’s most important challenges should remain unaddressed — a problem that has been slowly eroding the foundations of…

October 17, 2024

Harris’ Tax Plans Would Reduce Long-Term Prosperity. Trump’s Proposals Might Be Even Worse.

AEI Scholar and Director of Economic Policy Studies Michael R. Strain contributed to the Dispatch’s Symposium titled Economic Policy Experts: Doom, Thy Name Is Populism, as a group of experts outlined…

October 9, 2024

Learning the Right Lessons from the “China Shock”

https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/1844047782505808245 An influential 2013 paper by economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson finds an average reduction in manufacturing employment of 90,000 jobs per year from 1990 to 2007 because of…

October 3, 2024

Protectionism is Failing and Wrongheaded: An Evaluation of the Post-2017 Shift toward Trade Wars and Industrial Policy

Abstract The Trump–Pence and Biden–Harris administrations enthusiastically embraced protectionism. Each administration explicitly argued for a break from the bipartisan consensus of recent decades that has been generally supportive of free…

September 23, 2024

Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation

The views expressed in this report are those of the individual authors who collectively constitute the Grand Bargain Committee, co-chaired by Michael R. Strain and Isabel V. Sawhill. This report…

September 10, 2024

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

…time since 2003. AEI’s Michael R. Strain described how 2023 marks a year of recovery and improvement, made possible by the Federal Reserve’s successful efforts to get inflation under control…

June 26, 2024

American Workers Are Doing Great. They Could Be Doing Even Better.

Editor’s note: This is one of a pair of essays responding to the Economic Innovation Group’s report, “The American Worker: Toward a New Consensus”, by Adam Ozimek, John Lettieri, and…

December 18, 2023

The State of Democratic Capitalism: 2023

…is wrong. Their solutions won’t work. That economic reality will lead to a political course correction. The future for democratic capitalism is bright. Michael R. Strain holds the Arthur F….