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    Unemployment Claims Drop, but Holiday Week May Be a Factor

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesC.D.C. Shortens Quarantine PeriodsVaccine TrackerFAQAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUnemployment Claims Drop, but Holiday Week May Be a FactorThe decline was the first in three weeks, despite a resurgence of Covid-19 cases. Economists warn of more job losses ahead.A lone shopper at a department store in Midtown Manhattan on the day after Thanksgiving. The drop in weekly jobless claims is likely to have been depressed by the holiday week.Credit…Gabby Jones for The New York TimesBy More

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    Justice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. Workers

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. WorkersThe complaint, which targets the company’s hiring of immigrants on temporary visas, opens a new front in Washington’s battle against Big Tech.Outside the headquarters of Facebook, which the Justice Department accused of favoring immigrants over Americans when hiring.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York TimesBy More

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    Up to 30 Million in U.S. Have the Skills to Earn 70% More, Researchers Say

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUp to 30 Million in U.S. Have the Skills to Earn 70% More, Researchers SayThe findings point to the potential of upward mobility for people without a college degree.Microsoft is one of the major companies that have pledged to adopt skills-based hiring for many jobs, often dropping a college degree requirement.Credit…Stuart Isett for The New York TimesBy More

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    Biden Expected to Name Top Economic Officials This Week

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    WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to name top members of his economic team this week, including Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton labor economist, to run the Council of Economic Advisers, and Neera Tanden, the chief executive of the Center for American Progress, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, according to people familiar with the matter.The announcement — which will include Mr. Biden’s decision to name Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, as Treasury secretary — will culminate in several women in top economic roles, including the first Black woman to lead the Council of Economic Advisers. All three jobs require Senate confirmation.With the picks, Mr. Biden is showcasing a commitment to diversity in his advisers and sending a clear message that economic policymaking in his administration will be shaped by liberal thinkers with a strong focus on worker empowerment as a tool for economic growth.Two of Mr. Biden’s top economic aides during his presidential campaign, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, will also be named to the Council of Economic Advisers, which is a three-member team that advises the president on economic policy. Both Ms. Boushey and Mr. Bernstein come from a liberal, labor-oriented school of economics that views rising inequality as a threat to the economy and emphasizes government efforts to support and empower workers.In many ways, his team is unified by a commitment to running the economy hot — with strong growth and low unemployment — in order to drive up wages. And it is likely to signal an embrace of spending to help workers, businesses and local governments recover from the pandemic recession, regardless of the effect on the federal budget deficit.“President Biden’s appointments show that he is quadrupling down on his commitment to working people and raising wages,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. “He has appointed four of the best labor market economists in the country to head the Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers.”In addition to those roles, Mr. Biden is expected to name Adewale Adeyemo, a senior international economic adviser in the Obama administration, as deputy Treasury secretary.Mr. Biden has also selected Brian Deese, a former Obama economic aide who helped lead that administration’s efforts to bail out the American automotive industry, to lead the National Economic Council, according to three people with knowledge of the selection.Mr. Deese, 42, is not an academic economist but a veteran of economic policymaking, having served as the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget and the deputy director of the Economic Council under Mr. Obama. He was also a special adviser on climate change to Mr. Obama, a role that could signal Mr. Biden’s commitment to fashioning an infrastructure bill for his legislative agenda that heavily features spending on clean energy initiatives.Mr. Biden on Sunday announced an all-female White House communications staff, with Jennifer Psaki, a veteran of the Obama administration, in the most visible role as White House press secretary.Kate Bedingfield, 39, who served as a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, will serve as the White House communications director. Karine Jean Pierre, who previously served as the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org, will be the principal deputy press secretary. Pili Tobar, a former immigrant advocate with the group America’s Voice, will serve as the deputy White House communications director.Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden on the campaign, will serve as the senior adviser and chief spokeswoman for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Ashley Etienne, a former senior adviser to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will serve as the communications director for Ms. Harris.The appointments indicate Mr. Biden’s plan to include racial, gender and ideological diversity in top roles, fulfilling a campaign pledge to ensure that a broad swath of America is represented in policymaking decisions.But they could fall short of hopes within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has been frustrated that their views are not being sufficiently represented in early personnel decisions. In particular, the decision to select Ms. Tanden, a divisive and partisan figure in the Democratic Party, could culminate in an intraparty fight, as well as a confirmation battle.Republicans, who are expected to retain control of the Senate, are unlikely to easily pass Ms. Tanden, an Indian-American who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has been one of the most outspoken critics of President Trump.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Nov. 29, 2020, 6:35 p.m. ETBiden names all-female communications team with Jen Psaki as press secretary.Biden sees orthopedic doctor after spraining his ankle while playing with family dog.Biden team wants to tackle child care, elder care, preschool in one overarching plan.She also faces a challenge from Senate Democrats given her role in the 2016 election: Many of those who worked for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran against Mrs. Clinton, remain convinced that Ms. Tanden was part of a group of Democrats working behind the scenes to scuttle his nomination.Mr. Sanders, who ran against — and ultimately endorsed — Mr. Biden, is the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, which vets the director of the Office of Management and Budget, putting the fate of Ms. Tanden’s nomination under his watch.Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, referred to Ms. Tanden on Twitter on Sunday as a “sacrifice to the confirmation gods,” suggesting that her downfall would sate Republican anger toward Mr. Biden’s presidency and allow other nominees to more easily win confirmation.Drew Brandewie, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Twitter on Sunday evening that Ms. Tanden “stands zero chance of being confirmed.”The selection of Ms. Tanden, who was involved in the development of the Affordable Care Act as an adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration, is likely to resurface questions about the funding of the Center for American Progress. The New York Times reported last year that from 2016 through 2018, the center accepted nearly $2.5 million from the United Arab Emirates to fund its National Security and International Policy initiative.In addition, hacked emails from Ms. Tanden that were released through WikiLeaks in 2016 could also provide additional fodder for her critics.Mr. Biden’s other picks are most likely less contentious. Ms. Rouse, a labor economist, worked on Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011 and at the White House’s National Economic Council during the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, a pioneer in research on the role of women in the American economy and one of Ms. Rouse’s thesis advisers in graduate school, called her a leading expert on labor markets and education.“She is a deeply thoughtful person and a superb listener who brings out the best of those around her,” Ms. Goldin said.Mr. Bernstein was Mr. Biden’s first chief economist when he was vice president and has written extensively on the power of low unemployment and strong economic growth to bolster workers and wages. Ms. Boushey runs the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a liberal think tank focused on inequality, and was a top policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton in 2016. She has focused much of her research and writing on government initiatives meant to increase women’s participation in the labor force, such as paid leave programs.The appointments drew praise from Kevin A. Hassett, Mr. Trump’s first Council of Economic Advisers chairman.“They have put together a very strong team of experienced policymakers and smart economists,” Mr. Hassett said. “At this difficult time, it is great to know that a strong C.E.A. will be helping to guide policy.”Mr. Adeyemo is an immigrant from Nigeria and has extensive experience working at the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, when he was a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff. Mr. Adeyemo was also Mr. Obama’s chief negotiator for the macroeconomic policy provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Democrats ultimately opposed, and served as the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After a two-year stint as a senior adviser at BlackRock, he joined the Obama Foundation in 2019 as its president.Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting. More

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    Edward P. Lazear, Economist and Presidential Adviser, Dies at 72

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    Edward P. Lazear, a pioneering labor economist at Stanford University who advised President George W. Bush during the financial crisis, died on Monday. He was 72.The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said. It did not say where he died.Professor Lazear may be best remembered as the founder of a field that has come to be known as personnel economics, which seeks to understand how businesses hire, retain and pay employees. He also founded the Journal of Labor Economics and the Society of Labor Economists.But perhaps his most critical job was as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the American financial system buckled after a housing and debt bubble had burst, forcing the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions and rescue a sinking economy.“Eddie Lazear was a rare combination —-an extraordinary academic economist and a dedicated public servant who brought that intellect and skill to the solution of big policy problems,” said Condoleezza Rice, director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where Professor Lazear held a senior fellowship.In a statement, Mr. Bush called him “a trusted confidant” and “a beloved colleague.”Edward Paul Lazear was born in New York City on Aug. 17, 1948, and grew up in Los Altos, Calif. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1971 and received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where he worked with the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker and adopted his approach of applying economic tools to new domains.Professor Lazear began his professional career in 1974 as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He taught there for almost 20 years before joining the Stanford faculty.“He was the most natural economist I ever came into contact with,” said Paul Oyer, an economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “He was a deep economic natural thinker; he was born to be an economist.”Professor Lazear wrote a seminal paper about the relationship between worker pay and a company’s productivity and profits; it was based on a case study of the Safelight Glass Company. Productivity at the business soared when it shifted from paying workers an hourly wage to paying them according to the number of windshields they repaired. Professor Lazear figured out that this improvement hadn’t come about just because people had worked harder to earn more money. Rather, he found, the shift in wage policy had changed the composition of the installers: Slower workers had left the company and faster workers had taken their jobs.Professor Lazear wrote another famous paper explaining the rationale behind mandatory retirement, which was outlawed by Congress in 1986. He proposed that it is worthwhile for companies to pay workers less than what they are worth to the business when they are young, and then to raise their wages over time, to the point where they are paying them more than they are worth. But that, he found, meant that employees would try to hang on to their job for too long. Mandatory retirement thus helped solve the problem.“He is the father of a field that has had a lot of influence in the way firms design compensation and make hiring and retention policies,” said Erik Hurst, a labor economist at the University of Chicago. “This is of first-order importance for how people live their lives.”Professor Lazear fell squarely on the right of the economic policy spectrum. He was a fierce critic of the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus policies. He later championed the tax cuts signed by President Trump in 2017. He believed in the efficiency of markets and disliked the minimum wage and other government interventions.But even his ideological opponents acknowledged his integrity and commitment to rigorous thinking.“I admired the purity of his commitment to economics,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and Treasury secretary. “It is very rare among economists who work on things that have a bearing on politics.”Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard, said Professor Lazear’s work had often reached conclusions at odds with conservative views and policies.“He was not ideological on all things,” Professor Katz said, pointing out Professor Lazear’s work with Richard B. Freeman on the value of works councils, which are used in many European countries to give workers voice and power to negotiate with employers.Professor Lazear’s work also served to dispel the notion popular among American conservatives that policies that guaranteed job security condemned Europe to high unemployment and low productivity.During the financial crisis of the late 2000s and its aftermath, Professor Lazear was a critical voice demanding attention to the faltering job market as millions of people lost jobs and many people struggled to find work for months or even years.“You can see in his policy work these concerns for workers and their skills and how hard it is to transition between industries,” said Austan Goolsbee, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.Professor Lazear is survived by his wife, Victoria Lazear, and his daughter, Julie Lazear. More