Pia Orrenius

Madeline Zavodny

As the controversy over Arizona's new immigration law demonstrates, the economic recession has not taken immigration reform off the table. At this event, economists Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny will present their proposal for an employment-based immigration policy. Designed to protect America's economic competitiveness and long-run growth, this plan to overhaul current immigration policy is explained in their recently published book, Beside the Golden Door: U.S. Immigration Reform in a New Era of Globalization (AEI Press, 2010). Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks USA and Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development will join the authors in the discussion. [READ MORE]

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Public policy debates are increasingly based on matters of science, from issues such as energy and climate change to health and food safety. Yet the results of these debates vary, with good legislative outcomes when the available scientific evidence is used objectively and bad policy choices when it is interpreted subjectively in pursuit of a preordained policy agenda. This "bloody crossroads" of science and policy will be the subject of an all-day discussion at AEI. [READ MORE]

Gregory L. Schneider, associate professor of history at Emporia State University and author of three books, including The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), will deliver the October Bradley Lecture. [READ MORE]

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Overspending on Multisource Drugs in Medicaid
By Alex Brill
AEI Working Paper, July 2010

In this report, AEI research fellow Alex Brill analyzes a large subset of 2009 Medicaid drug data from the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program and identifies multisource drugs (that is, products for which there are brand and generic versions) with significant sales of more costly brand products. The results show that states' Medicaid programs engage in a large amount of unnecessary and wasteful drug spending by reimbursing pharmacies for relatively costly brand products when identical generic products are available. Given rising pressure on states' fiscal budgets, these findings, considered in conjunction with the conclusions of previous studies, indicate that continued wasteful spending in Medicaid is a problem requiring the prompt attention of policymakers. [READ MORE]

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AEI visiting scholar R. Glenn Hubbard and Columbia Business School's Chris Mayer argue that to open up credit markets and get the economy back on track, the government—which is already financing nearly nineteen out of every twenty new mortgages—needs to help struggling homeowners get more manageable monthly payments. [READ MORE]

Allan H. Meltzer, a visiting scholar at AEI, along with Hoover Institution fellows George P. Shultz, Michael J. Boskin, John F. Cogan, and John B. Taylor, contend that America's financial crisis, deep recession, and anemic recovery have largely been driven by economic policies that have deviated from proven, fact-based principles. [READ MORE]

Foreign Stimulus
By Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny
New York Times, September 14, 2010

Pia Orrenius, research officer and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Madeline Zavodny, an economics professor at Agnes Scott College, assert that America's antiquated, ineffectual immigration system must be overhauled. Their proposal, detailed in the recently published book Beside the Golden Door (AEI Press, 2010), would replace the current system with a provisional work-visa scheme that would allow the price mechanism to regulate immigration via visa-permit auctions. [READ MORE]

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AEI Press October 2010

In Health and Wealth Disparities in the United States, Anupam B. Jena of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Tomas J. Philipson of the University of Chicago's Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and Eric C. Sun of the Stanford University School of Medicine examine economic disparity in the United States. Starting from the premise that income disparity is too limited a measure of economic disparity, they formally incorporate the effects of health into their analysis, spanning from 1940 to 2000. The authors find that accounting for the value of health dramatically affects our understanding of wealth levels across groups, particularly across races. [READ MORE]

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Photos: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Agnes State College, dave/Flickr/Creative Commons, AEI, Bigstock/Andy Dean Photography, iStockphoto/Jim Parkin, and AEI