I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
A new study from the Brookings Institution concludes that extending unemployment benefits during times of high and long-lasting unemployment does little to prevent the unemployed from taking jobs and may actually boost the number of people employed.
The study by Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, also chief economist for the Department of Labor, says in part:
Nearly two years after the official end of the “Great Recession,” the labor market remains historically weak. Many commentators have attributed the ongoing weakness in part to supply-side effects driven by dramatic expansions of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefit durations, to as many as 99 weeks…
The various specifications yield quite similar results. UI extensions had significant but small negative effects on the probability that the eligible unemployed would exit unemployment, concentrated among the long-term unemployed. The estimates imply that UI benefit extensions raised the unemployment rate by only about 0.2–0.6 percentage points, much less than is implied by previous analyses. Half or more of this effect is due to reduced labor force exit among the unemployed rather than to the changes in reemployment rates that are of greater policy concern; some analyses even suggest that UI extensions, by keeping displaced workers in the labor market, may have increased the share who were later reemployed.
The Department of Labor’s figures say that there are at least four unemployed people for every one job opening. President Obama is seeking another extension of federal extended unemployment benefits, which are due to expire at the end of this year, but the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is likely to balk at that request.
