A now-irrelevant provision of the Voting Rights Act may soon be no more.

Hires, quits, and layoffs exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to employer growth rates in the cross section. Simple statistical models of these relationships greatly improve our ability to account for fluctuations in aggregate worker flows and enable us to construct synthetic measures of hires, separations, quits, and layoffs back to 1990.

The European Union (EU) has announced plans to levy a tax on airline emissions for all planes landing and taking off from EU airports. This tax would be calculated not only based on mileage flown in EU airspace but also for the entire length of the flight (thus, Chinese and Japanese airlines would be taxed for an entire journey from Beijing or Tokyo).

Forty-five years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department has adopted a definition of discriminatory intent that strengthens the federal hand in micromanaging districting in states and counties throughout the United States and increases the odds that the Supreme Court will soon cast a skeptical eye on Section 5.

In November 2011, the OCC, FRB, FDIC, and SEC issued a530 page joint proposal to implement Section 619 of the Dodd-FrankAct (the "Volcker Rule") to bar banking entities and their affiliatesfrom engaging in short-term proprietary trading. 

Now is not the time to sendU.S. diplomats to Tehran.

At issue in the Supreme Court case is the constitutionality of Section 5 of the recently reauthorized Voting Rights Act.

Former UN SecGen Kofi Annan just wrapped a breathtakingly cynical press conference in Turkey, insisting his peace plan for Syria is not dead despite new demands from the Assad regime and failure to withdraw from major city centers agreed to in the Annan plan.