News & Announcements
Around the campus
It is absurd that the working class is now paying higher tax rates than the richest people in America, argue Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in this Op-Ed for the New York Times. Read more (Illustration by Alex Merto)
Research on labor in boardrooms by Berkeley economics professor Benjamin Schoefer highlighted on NPR's Here and Now. The research found that companies become more productive when they put workers on their boards. Read the article and listen to the interview here
Michael Kremer, Berkeley Economics Prof. Ted Miguel’s former Ph.D. adviser at Harvard University, won the 2019 Nobel prize in Economics. To recognize Miguel’s contribution to the winners’ “experimental approach to alleviating poverty,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has invited him to the Nobel Prize award ceremony and banquet in Stockholm, Sweden, in December. Read the interview with Prof. Miguel here (Via Berkeley News)
Researchers have long noticed that wages hardly drop during recessions. But showing that this causes unemployment has proven tricky, according to economist Supreet Kaur. Kaur analyzed the wage, employment, and weather data of over 600 districts across India from 1956 to 2009. Like previous studies, she confirmed that nominal wages are sticky but real wages aren’t. Read more
Research suggests the most effective way to help poor people can be to give them no strings attached cash. A new study finds even neighbors who don't get the aid benefit from a big ripple effect. Listen to the interview with UC Berkeley Professor Ted Miguel on NPR's Morning Edition.
"Zucman is an economist, but he also had some of the qualities—youth and fervency—that investigative reporters often have, and that made him someone people would go to when they thought something was very wrong." Gabriel Zucman and his colleagues are advocating a progressive wealth tax as a solution to global inequality, one that rethinks both evasion and the goals of taxation. Read the New Yorker Story here.