What is "family income" and how does its definition and measurement affect estimates of income inequality in the United States? Nancy Folbre addresses these questions in a brief research note published by Washington Center for Equitable Growth. In the essay, she explains how the value of non-market work and intra-family transfers (typically omitted from consideration) lead to significant differences in the living standards of families with exactly the same market income.

Losses in private mortgage backed securities were at the epicenter of the financial crisis from 2007-2009. This paper by Thomas Herndon examines two features of mortgage fraud contributing to the financial crisis. It first accounts for total losses from foreclosure due to no/low documentation "Liar's Loans." It then estimates what portion of these losses can be considered excessive. Herndon finds that losses caused by fraud in Liar's Loans are substantial, prolonged, and concentrated in economically fragile neighborhoods. Specifically, Liar's Loans account for $345 billion of the $500 billion of total losses, $125 billion of which can be considered excessive.

This paper by Hao Qi creates a time series of the rate of surplus value for the Chinese economy over the extended period 1956-2014, using a Marxian approach. It finds that the high profitability that stimulated capital accumulation in the decade before the 2008 crisis had relied on the continuous growth in the rate of surplus value.  But after the crisis, the conditions supporting a high rate of surplus value—an expanding external market, a relatively large reserve army of labor, and a low debt-income ratio—have weakened.  This has led to a "new normal" pattern of declining profitability in China.