Barry Bluestone

Northeastern University | NEU · School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

This report explores how local government can improve decision-making by actively engaging citizens, business, academia and non-profits in a process called ‘co-creation’. We define co-creation as an inclusive and dynamic process where members of these five sectors – also known as the quintuple-helix or Q-helix - actively collaborate throughout the...

In some newly transit-rich neighborhoods (TRNs), a new station can set in motion a cycle of unintended consequences in which core transit users—such as renters and low-income households—are priced out of the neighborhood in favor of higher-income, car-owning residents who are less likely to use public transit. The authors describe these patterns an...

Economic development often founders on a mismatch between available workforce skills and companies’ needs. A tool that analyzes critical sets of labor market data not previously considered in tandem can help local governments improve planning.

This paper analyzes the proposed plant closing legislation, together with other complementary approaches to the orderly regulation of private capital disinvestment, especially as it occurs in the form of large-scale plant or store shutdowns. The authors also provide a review of the recent data on the incidence and employment impact of shutdowns dur...

The most recent census data show that on average, black and Hispanic households live in neighborhoods with more than one and a half times the poverty rate of neighborhoods where the average non-Hispanic white lives. Even Asians, who have higher incomes than blacks and Hispanics and are less residentially segregated, live in somewhat poorer neighbor...

The Urban Experience provides a fresh approach to the study of metropolitan areas by combining economic principles, social insight, and political realities with an appreciation of public policy to understand how U.S. cities and suburbs function in the 21st century. The book is grounded in the real life experiences of students and their families on...

Inner city labor markets have been described as "jobless ghettos" where deindustrialization has left an underclass with no more than a tenuous attachment to the mainstream economy. This article investigates whether the same phenomenon exists in a booming, diverse market. The results suggest that the labor force participation rates of black, Hispani...

In this paper we demonstrate that because of stagnating wages and rising job insecurity, there has been a change in the labor supply regime in the U.S. macroeconomy since the 1970s. There is now greater labor supply at any given officially measured unemployment rate. This induced growth in the quantity of labor effort is coming from experienced, in...

This paper is organized in three parts. First, we present the logic and original evidence for Phillip's Curve and NAIRU. We show that the sources of increased labor supply during the past two expansions have shifted significantly compared with the experience of the 1970's business cycle. The second part reviews the debate over whether American work...

Barry Bluestone, of the University of Massachusetts, and Teresa Ghilarducci, of the University of Notre Dame, show that although the poverty rate for elderly Americans has declined over the past three decades, the total number of persons in poverty has grown and the number of poor nonelderly dults in poverty has nearly doubled since 1970. The autho...

The factor-price-equalization theorem argues that international trade will tend to equalize factor prices between nations, but can also tend to exacerbate the returns between factors of production within countries. This paper argues that economic developments have fostered the increasing relevance of this result derived from Heckscher-Ohlin trade t...

This report assesses the economic impact of the University of Massachusetts at Boston (UMass/Boston) on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with attention to three major economic contributions: (1) the additional income that UMass/Boston students generate within the state as a result of their university education; (2) the added state income and sales...

Sufficient evidence now exists to confirm a strong rising trend in wage inequality in the US since at least the mid-1970s. Still elusive is a definitive explanation for this tendency. Researchers have now begun to turn their attention to two factors: on the supply side, an apparent rapid growth in the rates of return to education; and on the demand...

The proportion of workers earning low wages in the American economy declined from 1963 through 1979. Since 1979, both the low-wage and the high-wage shares of employment have increased, leading to wage polarization. Analysis of Current Population Survey data indicates that this occurred for both men and women. For men, this condition has been exace...

A proposal written by a group of economists suggests investing a portion of the Social Security surplus in a revolving loan fund designed to enable American students and workers to finance their own post-secondary education, vocational training, or re-training. The plan would make available to every American a line of credit to finance the costs of...

In December 1986, the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress made public its commissioned report, “The Great American Jobs Machine” (Bluestone and Harrison, 1986). It was to become one of the committee’s most controversial of the year. The “Jobs Machine” study concluded that during the 1980s the U.S. economy continued to churn out new...

[Excerpt] After the organization of the UAW, it could plausibly be argued that the union turned the game around. Indeed, by the late 1950s, the UAW could play one corporation off against another, setting as a strike target a single company while permitting the others to encroach on the market share and profits of the struck company. The strategy wo...

The current debate concerning the necessity and propriety of establishing an industrial policy for the United States turns, to a significant extent, on the question of whether the nation is undergoing deindustrialization. Using data on aggregate trends in manufacturing employment, Robert Z. Lawrence and others at the Brookings Institution claim tha...

The economy is well on its way toward a restructuring characterized by deindustrialization of the old manufacturing base and dualism in the evolving jobs distribution. These two phenomena cause serious social problems, including high levels of unemployment, downward occupational mobility, and a significant increase in earnings inequality. To combat...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/7501398.pdf

The purpose of the study is to begin a detailed investigation of the low-paid work force and to focus attention on the determinants of low-wage employment, by dissecting the various forces that contribute to the determination of wage levels for full-time full-year workers. The question is whether low-wage poverty can be eliminated by upgrading the...

Persistent school segregation does not mean just that children of diierent racial and ethnic backgrounds attend diierent schools, but that their schools are also unequal in their students' performance. This study documents nation-ally the extent of disparities in student performance between schools attended by whites and Asians compared to blacks,...

Traducción de: Growing Prosperity. The Battle for Growth with Equity in the Twenty-First Century

Prepared for the Manpower Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, under grant no. 91-24-70-51. Thesis--University of Michigan. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 405-414). Microfiche.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston College. Includes bibliographical references.

Traducción de: Growing prosperity: the battle for growth with equity in the twenty-first century Incluye bibliografía e índice

Is the current labor market as tight as official statistics would seem to indicate? If incumbent workers increase their hours of work, it is irrelevant to the unemployment rate, but hardly irrelevant to the level of labor supply. Bluestone and Rose find that job insecurity and stagnating wages have made Americans willing to work those extra hours t...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68344/2/10.1177_048661346900100103.pdf