The Employment Act of 1946: some history notes
of the 1930s, Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946. Its sponsors believed that earlier failures to deal with massive worldwide unemployment had contributed significantly to the rise of National Socialism, which eventually culminated in World War II. This belief urged the act’s sponsors to find a solution to the problem that had caused “such a great melting away of prosperity in such a short period of time.”’
Recreating the 1940s-Founded Institutions for Today's Global Economy Remarks upon receiving the Truman Medal for Economic Policy
It is a great honor to receive the Truman Medal for Economic Policy and to follow in the footsteps of Alan Greenspan, George Shultz, Paul Volcker, Allan Meltzer and Alice Rivlin—all people who I admire greatly and have learned much from. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants! I thank the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, The Henry W. Bloch School of Management, the Economic Club of Kansas City, and the Missouri Council on Economic Education.
The Cyclical Behavior of Industrial Labor Markets: A Comparison of the Pre-War and Post-War Eras
This paper studies the cyclical behavior of a number of industrial labor markets of the pre-war (1923-1939) and post-war (1954-1982) eras. In the spirit of Burns and Mitchell we do not test a specific structural model of the labor market but instead concentrate on describing the qualitative features of the (monthly, industry-level) data.The two principal questions we ask are: First, how is labor input (as measured by the number of workers, the hours of work, and the intensity of utilization) varied over the cycle ? Second, what is the cyclical behaviorof labor compensation (as measured by real wages, product wages, and real weekly earnings) ? We study these questions in both the frequency domain and the time domain. Many of our findings simply reinforce, or perhaps refine, existing perceptions of cyclical labor market behavior. However, we do find some interesting differences between the pre-war and the post-war periods in ther elative use of layoffs and short hours in downturns, and in the cyclical behavior of the real wage.