According to PERI Co-Director Gerald Epstein, since the mid-1980s, the short answer to this question is "no." Among the reasons: U.S. workers disproportionately finance the costs of U.S. imperialism through their taxes; and cheap imports facilitated by U.S. imperialism hurt U.S. workers' wages and job prospects. U.S. workers also pay in blood, as they constitute most of the U.S. military. But Epstein argues that, from the 1950s – 70s, U.S. workers did gain from imperialism, since they had more bargaining power and they paid a lower share of total taxes.

The impact of California's cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions on local air pollution has long been a topic of heated debate.  Environmental justice advocates feared that the program would not only fail to redress the disproportionate exposure of low-income communities and people of color to air pollution, but could exacerbate environmental disparities. Cap-and-trade proponents argued that reducing overall carbon emissions would translate, more or less automatically, into local air quality benefits.  James Boyce and Michael Ash of PERI review the evidence and find that the concerns of California's environmental justice advocates have been warranted.   

The Turkish economy suffered significantly from the crises of 1994, 2001, and 2008–09. This paper by Hasan Cömert and Erinς Yeldan presents a broad overview of these experiences.  The first two episodes were mostly finance-led and finance-driven, with repercussions on the real sectors thereafter.  By contrast, the 2008–09 crisis was a fully-fledged real sector crisis from the outset, including a direct collapse in employment and productivity.  Cömert and Yeldan's analysis provides a framework for understanding current developments in the Turkish economy.