Some links

I offer these links merely as proof that I have not died under suspicious circumstances, been kidnapped, or embarked on some quest in the week and a half since my last post.

1. A new issue of the Review of Economics of the Household is out. It is a special issue on time-use. Time-use data is becoming increasingly important and popular, and this issue looks like a good guide to recent work with it. The Review of Economics of the Household is an excellent journal, and the premier venue for the economics of the household, gender economics, etc. You will often also find this literature in labor journals, but this one is dedicated to the subject.

2. Speaking of the economics of the household, I've just received word that my submission to the Journal of Family and Economic Issues is now in "revise and resubmit" status. This journal is more interdisciplinary than the Review of Economics of the Household, and less known - so please check it out and cite!

3. Don Boudreaux and Liya Palagashvili have an op-ed in the WSJ discussing the alleged decoupling of wages from productivity. This is not just Don asserting the claim - they review recent research from reputable economists, and it's worth looking at. Obviously it's hard to assess the argument from an op-ed without going to the research, but I was glad to see this because the whole productivity decoupling thing has always seemed both worthy of concern and also a little bit of a black box to me. Statistics are necessarily highly aggregated, and productivity measures aren't exactly the marginal productivity we reference in theory. Don and Liya notes the wage/compensation thing. I feel like a lot of the analysis uses compensation but I could be wrong. Anyway, the decoupling is stark in the highly aggregated/somewhat imperfect data which makes it seem like something worth checking out but still a bit of a mystery. Take a look at the op-ed - perhaps it will solve some of the mystery for you.

4. The estimable Margaret Simms comments on Obama's proposal for young men of color.

5. The Urban Institute released nine reports (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) two days ago on the implementation of the ACA across different states. There's no way on God's green Earth I'll have the time to take a look at them in the next couple weeks, but I recommend them to you on the basis of two points: (1.) The Urban Institute does excellent health care research, and (2.) as most of you probably know I consider variation across states to be crucial to both policy evaluation and to robust liberal democracy - so this sort of analysis is valuable.