Your Thoughts Matter

Economics

Economic mobility: What Americans think about the American Dream

Source: JournalistsResource.org

Individual perception — for example, how people feel they are doing financially compared with others — often doesn’t jibe with reality.

Economic mobility is one area where beliefs solidify absent information. Research shows that Americans are chronically under-informed about the size of the economic inequality gap in the U.S. That leads people to think they are more economically mobile than they really might be. And misperception can impact policy.

7 big things you should know about the monthly jobs report

Source: JournalistsResource.org

Each month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its Employment Situation report. This report includes about two dozen distinct datasets that can help economists, journalists and the public understand the health of the nation’s economy. It’s where to find monthly changes to the number of people employed and the unemployment rate, and it’s a report that’s widely covered in the media, but isn’t always covered with much context.

How Fed rates helped fuel the investment bust that sparked the Great Recession

Source: JournalistsResource.org

As the Federal Reserve bumped interest rates more than 4 percentage points in the lead-up to the Great Recession, investors steered toward increasingly risky bets on the U.S. housing market, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.