Skip to content

Political Economy Research Institute

Basic Needs and the American Paycheck

David R. Howell

David Howell documents the growing threat to working class living standards driven by sharp declines in average pay quality. This paper constructs a set of pay quality indicators by anchoring different points in the wage distribution to the living standards they make possible with a single regular full-time job. Howell’s main findings include a substantial decoupling between decent-pay jobs and GDP growth as well as large absolute declines in pay quality for young men without college degrees. These and related results document profound long-term shifts in paycheck-based living standards across American demographic groups.

Read More

The Causes and Consequences of Financialization

Gerald Epstein

PERI researcher Gerald Epstein surveys the extensive literature on the contemporary rise of finance and its powerful global impact on economic and political activity. “Financialization” is the term broadly applied to characterize these developments. Epstein’s survey examines a wide range of issues. These issues include whether financialization is a dominant cause of the major malignancies confronting contemporary capitalism or primarily a symptom of a deeper set of factors. A related group of topics discussed by Epstein concerns the impact financialization exerts on the frequency and severity of financial crises and the rise of inequality.

Read More

The Growing Risks of Unregulated Private Credit Funds

Lenore Palladino and Harrison Karlewicz

PERI researcher Lenore Palladino and co-author Harrison Karlewicz examine the rapid growth of the private credit market and the funds, such as Blackstone and Apollo, operating in this market. On a global scale, this market has more than tripled in size since 2015, reaching $1.8 trillion in assets under management as of 2024. Palladino and Karlewicz examine the history of this market and the financial stability risks it poses. They emphasize that a major feature of this market is providing loans to borrowers who have been assessed as uncreditworthy by regulated banks.

Read More

Phasing Out Fossil Fuel Subsidies for the Green Transition

Robert Pollin, Shouvik Chakraborty and Gregor Semieniuk

This study by PERI researchers Robert Pollin, Shouvik Chakraborty, and Gregor Semieniuk develops a program for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies while protecting the well-being of the poor and other communities through alternative subsidy measures. The study is global in scope while also focusing on country-level case studies for India and Indonesia. The authors show that fossil fuel subsidies constitute both a major obstacle to advancing a successful global green transition and a huge financial resource that can be mobilized to help build a clean energy-dominant energy infrastructure.

Read More

Recent Research

See All Research