Congratulations to our Fall 2025 Weidenbaum Center Small Grant Awardees!

For weeks, stock markets have been falling, and the plunge accelerated after President Donald Trump on April 2 unveiled U.S. tariffs on virtually every country.

The salary bump that people who switch jobs used to command has vanished

“Economic Realities of the American Dream” What prompted the idea for the course?

One of us – Steve Fazzari – was trained as an economist, and the other – Mark Rank – as a sociologist. We’ve shared scholarly interests over the years as colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis. But our teaching partnership really began with a lecture Mark gave about his book “One Nation Underprivileged,” which explores the causes and consequences of poverty and how the reality of poverty conflicts with American values. This talk inspired Steve at a moment in his career when he sought to integrate economic inequality into his teaching.

Our conversations deepened as Mark was researching his next book, “Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes.” We realized that both of us could bring something unique to the table about the American Dream, and this was the spark for the class.

This prestigious recognition reflects his outstanding contributions to the field of econometrics and his influential research on education and labor markets.

Professor Yenmez will give special lectures on "Matroids and Matching" at the University of Tokyo on October 7th, 8th, and 11th, 2024 (JST).

Economist Yongseok Shin, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied the national data on hours worked by Americans.

The declining labour share of income in advanced economies is an important topic for policymakers. This column studies how different types of capital interact with labour using firm-level data from Korea. It shows that equipment capital and labour are complements, but software (a part of intangible capital) and labour are substitutes. As software improves, labour shares within firms decrease, and production shifts toward software-intensive firms, which tend to have higher markups and lower labour shares. These findings have important implications for the ongoing debates about technological change, market power, and income distribution, especially in the era of generative artificial intelligence.

Yongseok Shin was featured in Marketplace on 7/23/2024.

Yongs Shin's new paper featured in Politico on July 18, 2024.

Prof. M. Bumin Yenmez won an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant.