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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 of an entire menu of items at a single business adjust in response to a minimum wage increase. Using data we gather from a fast-food…

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 that democracy and capitalism are properly balanced, each sphere reinforces the other. Over the long term, capitalism requires liberal politics; and democracy will not maintain…

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 economic prosperity for decades. That problem? The national debt. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports that federal debt held by the public averaged 48.3 per…

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 the many ways in which either potential administration’s populism could lead to poor policy and worse economic outcomes. Below is a section from Michael R. Strain contribution….

October 9, 2024

Learning the Right Lessons from the “China Shock”

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 U.S. competition with imports from China. Those economists published another important paper, along with economists Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price, that found import growth from China led to…

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 trade and of allowing markets to shape US industrial and employment composition. But the protectionism of the Trump and Biden administrations has not succeeded and…

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 was sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Democracy and was prepared independent of influence from the center and from any other outside party or institution. It…

September 10, 2024

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

Event Summary On September 10, AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility gathered leading experts to analyze the new poverty and economic numbers from the US Census Bureau for 2023. 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…

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 Benjamin Glasner. The other is by Paul Krugman of the New York Times. To the Economic Innovation Group’s attempt to articulate a “new consensus” about the American…

December 18, 2023

The State of Democratic Capitalism: 2023

How to assess the health of democratic capitalism in the United States? Fundamentally, it is very strong. The marriage of democratic politics and a free-market economy continues to strengthen each, with free markets generating the employment opportunities and prosperity that lead to widespread support for our political system and the rule of law, strengthen democratic…