Aaron Nathans

The slow growing relationship between the economic expansion and wage growth was brought into the spotlight this week when McDonald’s announced it plans to raise wages by over 10 percent for company-owned restaurants.

It might just be the weather or garden-variety economic volatility, but no matter the reason, the storyline of an economic soft patch continued this morning.

There’s an interesting story in The Upshot section of The New York Times today about income inequality and life expectancy. The story highlights a study by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute that looks at the relationship between having higher income inequality in a community and the life expectancy of the people who live…

This morning’s downward revision of the fourth-quarter GDP number, from an already less-than-stellar 2.4 percent down to 2.2 percent, might lead one to believe the economic outlook is weak. But a look inside the numbers shows why things aren’t actually so bad, and why we believe the economy is poised for a stronger spring.

The American Institute for Economic Research takes a hard look at the two very different storylines in the U.S. economy in its March edition of its new Business Conditions Monthly, which was released on Wednesday.

The everyday cost of living, which has generally been down for the last year, swung higher in February, as energy prices snapped back.

We’ve been highlighting some distinct medium- and longer-term trends in consumer prices lately: Energy prices have been markedly down. Service prices have been gaining while the prices of goods have not. As we learned this morning with the monthly release of the Consumer Price Index, some of those trends took a vacation in February. 

On the occasion of President Obama’s visit to Cleveland, AIER Senior Research Fellow Bob Hughes appeared on National Public Radio’s Cleveland affiliate on Wednesday to speak about the economy on the program, “The Sound of Ideas.”

Observers are awaiting a statement from the Federal Reserve this afternoon, toward the end of its two-day meeting, that could shed light on when it will start raising interest rates.

Companies with happier employees tend to have higher stock prices, according to an interesting report by Glassdoor Inc., which was featured in The Wall Street Journal.