Assorted Links

1. Geography of a Recession: the USA as at May 2009. It's worth scrolling over this map as it can be filtered on a county-by-county basis, by metro area, areas with housing bubbles, rural ares and manufacturing centres.

2. In a related NYT article, David Leonhardt states that the current recession (in the States) is "causing much more job loss among the less educated than among college graduates. Those earlier recessions introduced the country to the concept of mass white-collar layoffs. The brunt of the layoffs in this recession is falling on construction workers, hotel workers, retail workers and others without a four-year degree."

Also: "The main reason that recessions tend to increase inequality is that lower-income workers are concentrated in boom-and-bust industries. Agriculture is the classic example. In recent years, construction has become the most important one."

3. The Race Between Education and Technology (Goldin and Katz): the high school graduation rate (in the States) was just above 20 percent in the late 1920s. By 1940, it was almost 60 percent. These graduates then became the skilled workers and teachers who helped build the great post-World War II American economy.

4. NYT Article: "Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say"

5. Richard Thaler: Are NFL teams’ ability to select players only slightly better than flipping coins?

6. Stephen Pudney: Modelling Individual Choice: The Econometrics of Corners, Kinks and Holes

7. John Cotter (UCD): Evaluation of behavioral hypotheses advanced by Case and Shiller (1988, 2002, 2009) in studies of boom and post-boom housing markets.

8. How the labour market affects monetary policy

9. Just heard about the Robin Hood Tax idea. Bill Nighy promotes it here. A good idea?

10. If you thought the Irish banks are scary now, then check this out... (H/T Alan Dunne)

11. The "This Week in Ireland" Podcasts