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As the current recession ends, many workers will not be returning to the jobs they once held--those jobs are gone. InThe New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The book tells stories of people at work--a high-end financial advisor, a customer service representative, a pair of successful chefs, a cardiologist, an automotive mechanic, the author Victor Hugo, floor traders in a London financial exchange. The authors merge these stories with insights from cognitive science, computer science, and economics to show how computers are enhancing productivity in many jobs even as they eliminate other jobs--both directly and by sending work offshore. At greatest risk are jobs that can be expressed in programmable rules--blue collar, clerical, and similar work that requires moderate skills and used to pay middle-class wages. The loss of these jobs leaves a growing division between those who can and cannot earn a good living in the computerized economy. Left unchecked, the division threatens the nation's democratic institutions. The nation's challenge is to recognize this division and to prepare the population for the high-wage/high-skilled jobs that are rapidly growing in number--jobs involving extensive problem solving and interpersonal communication. Using detailed examples--a second grade classroom, an IBM managerial training program, Cisco Networking Academies--the authors describe how these skills can be taught and how our adjustment to the computerized workplace can begin in earnest.

We analyze causes of the surge in defaults experienced by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the Great Recession. Our data are consistent with the following: The two faced a trade-off between subsidized risk-taking (due to a guarantee implied by their charters) and franchise value (due to the scarcity of their charters). Around 2005 there was a change in the relative benefits of the two due to increased competition from “private label” securities. Along with declines in house prices, the increase in defaults is best explained by exercising an option to change strategy, before regulators fully caught on, toward newer, riskier loan types, after the decline in franchise value.

Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America,Debtor Nationtraces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream--thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition. How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful--choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production. From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending,Debtor Nationpresents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.

There is a modest amount of research on the valuation impact of green housing features, but research on renovations or remodeling, which include green features called \"green retrofits,\" cannot be found. The analysis in this paper uses consistent controls and methods to investigate the valuation implication of green retrofits on residential transaction prices. We find that renovated properties in the sample of residential transaction prices are sold at price levels 5.8% higher on average than properties that are not renovated, all else equal. However, green retrofits sell for 9.9% higher on average than non-renovated properties, and green retrofits sell for about 12.7% higher on average than non-green renovated properties. It appears that investment in residential green building features is capitalized in housing prices. We find that green retrofitted properties spend fewer days on the market compared to other transactions.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. InFault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed. Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world. InFault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been in conservatorship for over a decade. In September 2019, the U.S. Treasury proposed a plan to release the Government Sponsored Enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from conservatorship through administrative action. This article shows that every action in this plan is much harder in theory than in practice; they will either take longer than anticipated, present more issues than is initially apparent, or is inherently contradictory. As a result, there is substantial doubt this plan can be completed in the next five years.

Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) comprise a powerful organizational sector that has been criticized for its lack of accountability to governments and their citizens. These organizations are established to serve the public as a whole by targeting the needs of particular groups or fulfilling specific functions. Often they use practices adopted from the business sector, and sometimes they enter the marketplace as profitmaking enterprises. In light of the contribution of GSE Fannie Mae to the 2008 world economic crisis, the impact of this sector on effective democratic government bears further examination. In this article, I present a systems model that suggests how researchers might comprehensively assess the accountability of organizations in this sector, here termed the \"gray sector,\" with respect to their government missions. I focus on four systems dimensions: mission, organizational design, organizational outcomes, and the information feedback process. Organizational design and the nature of the sector population are cited as emerging issues of particular importance.

Behind every financial crisis lurks a \"political bubble\"--policy biases that foster market behaviors leading to financial instability. Rather than tilting against risky behavior, political bubbles--arising from a potent combination of beliefs, institutions, and interests--aid, abet, and amplify risk. Demonstrating how political bubbles helped create the real estate-generated financial bubble and the 2008 financial crisis, this book argues that similar government oversights in the aftermath of the crisis undermined Washington's response to the \"popped\" financial bubble, and shows how such patterns have occurred repeatedly throughout US history. The authors show that just as financial bubbles are an unfortunate mix of mistaken beliefs, market imperfections, and greed, political bubbles are the product of rigid ideologies, unresponsive and ineffective government institutions, and special interests. Financial market innovations--including adjustable-rate mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps--become subject to legislated leniency and regulatory failure, increasing hazardous practices. The authors shed important light on the politics that blinds regulators to the economic weaknesses that create the conditions for economic bubbles and recommend simple, focused rules that should help avoid such crises in the future. The first full accounting of how politics produces financial ruptures,Political Bubblesoffers timely lessons that all sectors would do well to heed.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two large government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that are at the center of US residential mortgage finance, are \"elephants in the room\" that are being ignored as part of broad-brush financial sector reform. Neither the Dodd-Frank Act nor recently proposed overhauls of Dodd-Frank have addressed reform of the GSEs' structures, although the GSEs were placed in government conservatorships in early September 2008 and have remained in that state since then. In this article, we review what the GSEs do and how they got themselves into financial difficulties, and we provide an overview of some of the major proposals for reforming the US residential mortgage finance system. We conclude with our own ideas and suggestions for how housing finance, as well as housing policy more generally, should be reformed.