Unlike the workers in many economic models, most real workers don’t work full time, without gaps throughout their adult lives, and see steadily rising earnings. Instead, real-life variables come into play, as do short-term exogenous economic shocks. How do workers’ returns on retirement investment respond to these variables, and how do returns vary by demographic differences? In this PERI Working Paper, Research Associate Christian Weller and Jeffrey Wenger explore the interconnections between financial market swings, employment and wage fluctuations, demographics, and retirement savings accumulations. The find considerable evidence that accumulations differ by education, race and gender, largely due to structural relationships between the financial and labor markets. Weller and Wenger discuss the policy implications of their findings, suggesting that a balanced mixed of retirement savings vehicles should remain widely available, and that retirement savings policies should factor in long-term wage protection.

>> Download "The Interplay between Labor and Financial Markets: What are the Implications for Defined Contribution Accounts?"

Industrial facilities in the United States release some 1.5 billion pounds of industrial toxics into the air each year. The latest version of PERI's Toxic 100  uses the most recent available data from the Risk Screening Environmental Indicators project of the Environmental Protection Agency to rank the largest corporations in the United States by the human health risk from their airborne toxic releases. The rankings take into account not only the quantity of releases, but also the relative toxicity of chemicals, the exposure of nearby populations, and transport factors such as prevailing winds and height of smokestacks. PERI's Toxic 100 builds on the achievements of the right-to-know movement. The goal is to engender public participation in environmental decision-making, and to help stakeholders translate the right to know into the right to clean air.

>> Go to the Toxic 100 Index

Sub-Saharan Africa experienced massive capital flight from 1970 to 2004, according to a new study by PERI researchers Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce. They estimate the total volume of capital flight over this 35-year period at $420 billion (in 2004 dollars), a huge drain of resources in a region suffering from widespread poverty and crushing external debts. Statistical analysis shows that roughly 60 cents of every dollar borrowed abroad flowed back out as capital flight in the same year, suggesting that much of Africa’s capital flight was “debt-fueled.” Policies to recover looted wealth and encourage repatriation of externally held assets can help to secure resources for investment. In addition, the fact that much past external borrowing appears to have been diverted into private hands means that African governments have a strong case for repudiating “odious” debts, a strategy that could not only ease current debt burdens but also improve the quality of international lending in coming years.

>> Download "New Estimates of Capital Flight from Sub-Saharan African Countries: Linkages with External Borrowing and Policy Options"
>> Read about the policy implications of this work on the Tax Justice Network

Several years ago, PERI assembled an international team of scholars to assess the impact of inflation targeting central banks on employment, income distribution and economic growth in developing countries. A major goal of the project was to devise concrete alternative policies in country-specific contexts that could achieve superior macroeconomic outcomes. These approaches explicitly aim at not only stabilizing inflation at reasonable levels, but targeting other important variables, such as employment generation, investment promotion, and real exchange rate stabilization at competitive levels. Now the papers from this project have been collected and published in a special issue of International Review of Applied Economics. The journal will be followed by publication of the papers and additional commentary in a book later this year. The special journal issue and book are edited by the project's directors, PERI's Co-Director, Gerald Epstein, and Erinc Yeldan of Bilkent University.

>> Go to the International Review of Applied Economics
(you may need to access this page through a University website)
>> Read more about PERI's project on Alternatives to Inflation Targeting