Research Papers

by Lindy Davies
An editorial in the New York Times recently expressed concern over cyber-attacks being perpetrated by Chinese hackers against United States military, business and industrial computer systems. The editorial suggested that the US and Chinese governments try to quickly come to terms with this problem, perhaps by a negotiated [...]

Please join us for a 
discussion:
Pace University, New York City
Room: W613
Time: Saturday, 8th of June 03:40pm-05:20pm 

Wall Street had a record year in profits last year. Bonuses were up and stock prices zoomed. Meanwhile, the productive classes continued to see their wages stagnate as they have for 40 years, while under-reported inflation figures and [...]

by Lindy Davies
Readers may have noticed the recent flap over the Internal Revenue Service subjecting conservative groups to extraordinary levels of scrutiny. Mostly these are folks who call themselves Patriots, who are Taxed Enough Already! (Heavens, why would that ring any alarms at the IRS?)
This conversation is taking place in [...]

by Lindy Davies
My general impression of Jeffrey Sachs is that the things he says usually make some sense; he’s well-credentialed, widely published, quoted, cited, featured, y’know, and what-all. So I was a bit surprised, yesterday, to see a steaming pile of fresh bull-phunqué under his byline, titled “Time to End [...]

by Lindy Davies
Glancing at HuffPost over morning coffee (something that costs about $1.50 these days at most NYC bodegas), I noticed that a couple of bloggers, Jessica Prois and Eleanor Goldberg, are documenting their participation in the “Live Below the Line” campaign of the Global Poverty Project. The challenge they’ve [...]

The first day of the Land and Poverty Conference, as I approached the World Bank from H Street, I noticed several homeless people still sleeping on the benches outside. As I cleared the trees separating the tiny Edward R Murrow park (“Look now, pay later”),  from the Bank, I looked [...]

by Lindy Davies
My awesome colleague Jacob Shwartz-Lucas mused, in his recent WorkandWealth piece, on Rent — which, he notes, “has a very nuanced meaning in Economics.” Though Jacob said “meaning,” he talked about definition — which is understandable. He was making an economic point — and academic economics has done [...]

I’m here at the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference today, sharing ideas with policy makers around the world. Yesterday, I was able to pose a question to Festus Mogae, the former president of Botswana, about the country’s high taxes on diamond rents, and the corresponding low taxes on citizens [...]

by Dr. Polly Cleveland
On the NewsHour Friday night, in response to the dismal new jobs numbers, Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business blames the loss on “powerful” new labor-saving technology. But if he’s right, is it the technology itself, or the large corporations that install it?
The claim [...]