Click on the image for the Morning Economic Reports from the week of July 3.
There has been a considerable volume of discussion in recent weeks about jobs in coal mining. Last year, about 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities according to a Department of Energy report. The coal industry, which has shed jobs since 2012 primarily due to competition from cheap natural gas, employed about 160,000 workers nationally...
According to the U.S. Labor Department, seven states registered their lowest unemployment rates on records dating back to 1976. These seven states were Arkansas, California, Colorado, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington. After years of elevated unemployment, Mississippi’s unemployment rate is now below five percent...
While an incredible amount of attention has been given to the fact that unemployment is at or near multi-year lows in many American communities, there are instances in which the labor market refuses to fully heal. This is particularly true for Americans with disabilities...
Thirteen years ago, two prominent U.S. economists wrote that driverless cars couldn’t be taught to execute a left turn against oncoming traffic because there were too many variables involved. Those economists were wrong. As reported by Bloomberg, just six years later, Google proved that it could craft fully autonomous cars, threatening the livelihoods of millions of truck and taxi drivers in the process...
Later this month, many young people will head off to college. Sounds fun, but of course college isn’t free for most folks and many people end up taking on significant debt. A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzes the implications of expanding student debt...
