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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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New study refutes the notion that millennials are huge slackers

Millennials, now the largest generation in the workforce, have a reputation for demanding greater flexibility in the workplace — and maybe even for being slackers. However, a new study by Project: Time Off shows that millennials are more likely than other generations to forgo vacation and feel guilty and afraid about the prospect of taking time off.

That study, which surveyed 5,641 full-time employees who get paid time off, coined a term to describe American employees who have a tough time taking vacation: work martyr. Nearly 48% of millennials surveyed actually think it’s good for their bosses to think they’re work martyrs, compared to 39% of generation X and 20% of baby boomers. That report found that 43% of work martyrs are millennials — a bigger representation than any other generation group.

Moreover, the survey found millennials to be the most likely to forfeit their vacation days, with 24% reporting they’d either forfeited days last year or weren’t sure if they had, compared to 20% of generation x and 17% of boomers.

With more than 28% of millennials in management roles already, it could be crucial to examine the work martyr mentality to ensure it doesn’t become an even more accepted norm.

“So it’s really important that if you are a manager of millennials or millennial manager that you are cognizant of these issues and you work to correct them,” Katie Denis, report author and senior director of Project: Time Off, tells Yahoo Finance. “Because if you don’t, there’s huge negative consequences for businesses like burnout, disengagement and all those intangible stuff that we are starting to understand just how much it affects our bottom line.”

It might not be a coincidence that many millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession and have faced job instability and sky-high rates of student loans.

“I think what makes millennials different and more likely want to prove themselves is first of all, they graduated into a really rough economy, the worst that we’ve seen since the Great Depression,” Dennis says. “On top of that they have record student loan debts so the financial pressure is huge.”

She added. “So, I think all this pressure makes them think, okay if I have a job I need to make sure I’m holding onto it and proving myself that I am doing everything that I can possibly do.”

This is not the first survey to find millennials are afraid to take a real vacation.

Last year, Alamo Rent A Car released a survey of 1,000 adults showing that 34% of millennials worked every single day of their vacations. Another survey by Alamo this year also said that 59% of millennials felt a sense of “shame” for taking vacation compared to 41% of those in older generations.

It seems the anti-vacation attitude among millennials is deeply entrenched, and they may need some pressure from above to actually take vacation.

“I think [millennials] are going to change company culture, but I am not sure if it will be for the better based on this report,” Denis concludes. “And, I think they definitely believe in the benefits of time off, but then I think that they are really letting that company pressure to get to them. And their behavior doesn’t really line up with their belief system. So I think we are going to need a lot of encouragement from above for them to understand that [taking vacation] is a good thing, not just an okay thing, but a really good thing.”

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#mcdonalds #burger king #mac n cheetos #whopperrito #double down #kfc #twinkies #hostess #$WMT #$mcd #$qsr #$wen #$GRSHU #_yfinance:segment=market_pulse #_ymedia:video-channel=investing #_uuid:2a19734b-d303-33e0-b89a-01795bdb460e #_wp:82205

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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The racial wealth gap is at its biggest ever and getting worse

By 2044, America will be a majority-minority country, meaning that whites will only make up 49.7% of the population. Current minorities like Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Asians will soon make up a majority of the American populace.

And yet, the racial wealth gap is at its worst ever. And it won’t improve anytime soon.

According to a new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), a nonprofit for low-income families and communities in the US, black and Latino families won’t match white wealth for centuries.

The report finds that over the past 30 years, the average wealth of white families grew by 84%, which is 1.2 times faster than the average rate of growth for Latinos, and three times the rate of growth for blacks. By 2044, when America becomes a majority-minority country, the wealth gap between white families and black families will double.

The wealth divide, via CFED

It will take black families around 228 years, and Latino families 84 years, the report estimates, to achieve the same average wealth white families have today.

“If we keep going down this path of racial wealth inequality growing for minority populations, we are going to have an American economy that no longer has financial security but financial insecurity in exchange for wealth and inequality,” says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, primary author of the CFED report. “And I don’t think that’s what America wants. That’s not good for anyone—not for the people on top and definitely not for the people in the middle and bottom.”

What created this minority wealth gap in the first place?

Harry Holzer, public policy professor at Georgetown University, tells Yahoo Finance, “We know that income inequality has grown, and we know how badly the bursting of the housing bubble hurt minorities, who were more likely to have home predatory loans, and whose rates of homeownership went up the most during the bubble years. If you put those two facts together, it’s not a huge surprise. Having said that, the numbers are very very stark. The numbers kind of slap you in the face, just how big these gaps have become. It’s troubling.”

Homeownership is still the one of the biggest sources of American wealth. The report finds that 41% of black households and 45% of Hispanic households own their homes, while 71% of white households own their homes. On top of that, the report finds that blacks and Latinos built less wealth through homeownership than white homeowners did.

Even though housing is the biggest driver widening the racial wealth divide, the report cites other contributing factors: greater rates of unemployment; lower returns on income earned; lower entrepreneurship rates; and non-existent retirement savings, among others.

The average household wealth gap between white households and black or Latino households was $500,000 in 2013. Without significant change, the average gap could reach $1 million by 2044. The report predicts white household wealth would continue to rise, and top out around $1.2 million, while Latino households would only reach an average $165,000 in that time and black households only $107,000.

“We are headed towards a more and more divided country by race and economics and I think we are on track for these divisions to become deeper,” Asante-Muhammad says. “And I think that’s something troubling and it needs to be discussed.”

What might help reduce the gap? Reforming the tax code, Asante-Muhammad argues, and fixing what he calls “upside-down tax incentives.”

Along with this policy intervention, the report also suggests “an evidence-based, government-wide audit of federal policies to understand the role current policies play.” Such an audit might require the appointment of a special federal advisor whose entire role would be to focus on reducing the racial wealth divide.

Because of the current political divide in Congress, many are not exactly optimistic that change will come. “Unless the two parties say, ‘Now is the time for a really big tax reform,’ where everything is on the table, corporate rates and individual rates,” says Holzer, “otherwise it’s gonna be pretty tough.”

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Minyoung Park is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

Morgan Stanley: Self-driving cars and apps like Uber could boost booze industry

How the Supreme Court is hurting the economy by killing immigration reform

America’s brick-and-mortar retailers are vanishing

#US Economy #housing market #racial wealth gap #wealth divide #_uuid:30346dec-6bd9-3acf-8833-0dd91aa68804 #_wp:79513

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Morgan Stanley: Self-driving cars and apps like Uber could boost booze industry

yahoo

In 2014, alcohol played a role a third of motor-vehicle deaths in the US. However, ride-hailing services like Uber and so-called self-driving cars could reduce the number of DUI accidents, fatalities and arrests, according to new research from Morgan Stanley.

And ride-sharing services and autonomous vehicles could also potentially be a boon for the alcohol industry — including bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, according to the research led by Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas.

The alcoholic beverage industry is already huge; the global drinking population right now is 2.1 billion while the total drinks consumed per year is 1.1 trillion. Value per drink is $1.33, which all totals a whopping $1.5 trillion worth of drinks consumed per year. But according to the new report, the industry might have the potential to grow even more with shared and autonomous vehicles.

“Shared and autonomous vehicle technology help address the mutual exclusivity of drinking and driving in a way that can significantly enhance the growth rate of the alcohol market and on-trade sales at restaurants,” the Morgan Stanley study notes.

While the average person has 542 drinks per year, autonomous cars and ride-hailing apps could bring that number up to an additional 52 drinks, according to the Morgan Stanley report. With each drink valued at $2.32, that could create $98 billion in revenue. (Morgan Stanley placed a higher value on drinks resulting from autonomous or shared vehicles, as those drinks would be consumed in bars or restaurants rather than at home.)

The restaurants that stand to benefit include those whose alcohol sales account for 10% to 20% of revenue, including BJ’s Restaurants, (BJRI), Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD), and Brinker International (EAT), which owns Chili’s among other big chains.

Morgan Stanley is not the first to suggest ride-hailing apps like Uber or Lyft could spur alcohol sales. In 2015, the Los Angeles Times wrote that “Uber lets you drink more.” That story quoted Francois Renaud, managing partner at restaurant called Terrine, who called ride-hailing apps “a game-changer.”

“The difference is in the second bottle of wine ordered,” he told the LA Times.

Of course, the notion that autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving cars, could spur more drinking is more controversial. While so-called self-driving cars are still in their infancy, it’s generally assumed that drivers must be responsible for their vehicles even if they’re on “autopilot” mode.

Tesla itself — which is a pioneer in this area — has noted that drivers who use its autopilot feature “need to maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” It’s hard to do that while drunk.

“I think the automotive dealers where they are like Tesla and some of the others, I don’t think they are at the point right now where they are suggesting that [the vehicle] could be unmanned,” Michael J. Whitekus Ph.D., a toxicologist, says. “They are suggesting that you will still have to be engaged with the driving process and an intoxicated person certainly cannot be engaged with the process.”

Whitekus instead sees Uber as a safer option for intoxicated people: “I see Uber as a better comparison [to autonomous vehicles] to be honest. Uber right now you can get in and someone else drives you. As long as you can trust them to get you home and they are not going to mug you or take advantage of you because you are intoxicated, which is a whole set of other issues, then you’re going to be in pretty good shape. But these semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, they are not there yet.”

Minyoung Park is a writer for Yahoo Finance.

Facebook may be the key to marketing to an important demographic: moms

How the Supreme Court is hurting the economy by killing immigration reform

America’s brick-and-mortar banks are vanishing

A mysterious US industry has been growing since the recession — psychic services

#video #_yfinance:segment=the_final_round #_ymedia:video-channel=investing #_uuid:5bdc7732-ba33-34cb-9bca-4a7b55fe44f5 #_wp:78128

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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4 ways to save – and travel – while studying abroad

Young female tourist studying map

One of the biggest perks students look forward to during college is studying abroad – a chance to experience a new country and its culture in a leisurely way. According to Open Doors, a program within the US State Department, during the 2013-14 academic year, there were more than 304,000 of US students studying abroad for credit, an increase of 5% over the prior year.

And although finance isn’t the biggest driver when deciding to spend a semester or two in another country, some students can actually be financially better off abroad, especially if they’re enrolled at a pricey college in a region with a high cost of living.

That was the case for Lisa Lee, a rising senior at New York University where the average tuition and fees come to $46,170 a year while living in the most expensive city in America. On average, the cost of tuition, fees, board and room during the 2015-2016 school year for private nonprofit four-year college was $43,921. And as a student on a tight budget, Lee found herself spending less in Madrid than she would’ve spent if she had stayed at NYU for her sophomore spring semester.

While Spain is on the list of costliest countries for US students to study abroad, it is possible to do it on the cheap, Lee did. What’s more, she managed to travel to five countries, 23 cities in just five months – all within a budget. How did she do it? These are some of her tips:

1. Have a lot of converted cash and take out a good amount each time you visit an ATM machine. This makes it easier not only to keep track of your spending (and avoid mindless credit card swipes) but also to avoid high ATM fees.

Lee says, “Honestly, it all depends on your spending. It does vary per person because if you just want to stay home and cook and not do anything and you don’t spend that much money on things other than traveling, you don’t need to have that much cash.”

But she took around $1,500 converted into euros to start off with and then took out $300 and at most $500 from the ATM machine throughout the semester, as someone who went out almost every day.

“So, I needed a bit more spending money,” she says. “But I went to the ATM very few times. I think I can count with my fingers how many times I went.”

Lee also cautions readers to be smart about the amount they carry: “People were getting pick-pocketed left and right, so I would carry at most 75 euros every time I went out in Spain, which is still even a lot,” she says. “One time I did actually get pick-pocketed. Thank goodness I only had 10 euros in there.”

2. Take advantage of favorable exchange rates. When Lee went to Europe in the first half of 2015 – she lucked out by going at a time when the dollar went farther. She took out more money at the beginning of her stay to take advantage of the good rate.

“While I was traveling, I was constantly calculating the dollar-to-euro ratio, which I really recommend people to do because then you can kind of compare whether or not something is cheap or expensive,” she says.

3. Look at all housing options and remember to look into Airbnb and hostels when traveling to other cities.

Lee stuck with the dorms that NYU housing provided in Spain, which was considerably less than the New York City dorm. In Spain, she paid around 515 euros ($575.20) for a shared apartment option each month, while in the New York, she paid around $8,000 for a semester, 4 months, in a shared dorm room.

When she traveled to other cities, Lee compared all housing options to get the best deal. She mainly looked into Airbnb and even with certain preferences, like location and style, she managed to spend only around 30 to 60 euros ($33 to $66) per night.

“That was the average cost, sometimes there were cheaper options but those were the crazy outliers,” she says. “And I mean if you think about it, one night at a hotel is probably around $90 to $100 in the US but I was spending close to 30 to 40 euros.

4. Book flights months in advance. To get the cheapest flights, Lee booked every trip she planned to go on during spring break and long weekends as soon as she landed in Spain. Obviously, this requires some advance planning and knowing where you want to go months before.

Not only did she buy her tickets early, she also looked into other transportation options like trains and buses. And sometimes she found that it was cheapest to take smaller, lesser-known airlines for flights within Europe, including Vueling, Easyjet, Ryanair and Norwegian.

“During spring break, [my friends and I] flew to London but then took the bus from London to Paris and that was eight to 10 hours, which was a long bus ride but that was cheaper than a plane ride,” she says.

#money #travel #study abroad #college #save #_membership:list=a7bdb81f-5336-40e4-a415-1e2e038054b7 #_uuid:c759ca58-1e7c-3a05-a0ee-56933070b8fe #_wp:58251

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Facebook may be the key to marketing to an important demographic — moms

Priscilla Chan, who’s married to Mark Zuckerberg, is almost certainly a mom who’s on Facebook.

While digital platforms often try to market to millennials, there’s another demographic they should also make an effort to appeal to: mothers, who often do the lion’s share of housework and may use technology to make their lives easier.

In fact, 88% of moms with kids below the age 18 use some kind of social media, according to a 2016 Moms and Media report from Edison Research, which surveyed 2,001 consumers including 319 mothers. Those mothers spent an average of two hours and 58 minutes online over a 24-hour period, and 79% owned a smartphone.

“When the technology to get things done is right in the palm of her hand, mom will use it,” Melissa DeCesare, author of the Moms and Media annual reports from Edison Research and a mom of two children, tells Yahoo Finance. “The smartphone dominates the mobile space for mom because it helps her keep on top of her very full to-do list. Mobile has been a game changer for everyone, but especially for moms.”

The report found that mothers, in particular, are huge Facebook users, with 74% having used Facebook in the week prior to being surveyed. And moms checked Facebook 10.1 times a day compared to the non-mothers surveyed, who checked it just 6.9 times every day.

Sara R. Fisher, a mom of two kids and the co-founder of 2 Moms Media, a marketing and public relations company that caters to brands that want to be reach moms, tells Yahoo Finance that she also uses Facebook for multiple professional and personal purposes.

“I need to be honest, Facebook is really like the number one platform I use,” she says. “Like the other moms, I use it to get news, to keep up with my friends, businesses or other influencers. I check Facebook more than any other platform because I feel like it really encompasses all of it.”

While Facebook seems to be the favorite online activity among moms, they also turn to other platforms such as online radio and podcasts. In the month prior to the Edison survey, 61% of listened to online radio. A third of moms had used Pandora in the week prior to being surveyed, and half of moms accessed the internet on their mobile phone. Advertisers and marketers need to take advantage of all this time mothers spend online, according to DeCesare.

“[Moms’] buying power and their decision making for the household are what prompt [the researchers] to focus on moms’ media habits,” she said. “Moms are very engaged on social media, they spend a lot of time on the Internet and they are mobile which allows for engagement at any time or anywhere.”

DeCesare added: “Advertisers and marketers need to be able to reach moms for their product messaging. Moms are a key demo.”

So, Fisher and her business partner, Caitlin Murray Giles, both moms, started their company, 2 Mom Media, to help companies reach mothers in a targeted and authentic way.

“We understood how we wanted to be spoken to and we have the skill sets so we felt like this was a natural step for us to take and our kids are young and we can relate [to what others moms want],” says Fisher on why she started 2 Moms Media.

She targets her audience through private mom groups on Facebook : “We get most of our bang for the buck on these groups and now we’ve been in this industry and have been working here for a while, we know who those people are and we work with them.” In these private groups, moms share their thoughts about products they like and give tips to fellow moms.

Nowadays, with so many ways to get information and with more choices ahead, media is no longer just for the younger crowds like teenagers. Parents like moms are active members on these platforms and they expect to be reached more personably and directly. For marketers and companies, this may be good news but also one that is challenging.

“You have to be very targeted or else you are going to miss people,” Fisher says. “I feel like it is very valuable to own a niche where you understand the audience you have the connection and you can place your product and message in a targeted way that people can see it.”

Minyoung Park is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

How the Supreme Court is hurting the economy by killing immigration reform

America’s brick-and-mortar retailers are vanishing

A mysterious US industry has been growing since the recession — psychic services

#$FB #_uuid:b197d845-e545-3042-a91f-f5579742ec13 #_wp:55135

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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Instagram adds Snapchat-style feature just in time for Olympics

yahoo

Instagram rolled out a big new feature on Tuesday, and a big-name Olympic athlete to use and promote it first.

The feature is called Stories and allows you to show shareable moments of your day in a condensed slideshow format that is separate from your Instagram profile.

Sound familiar? You might have seen it before… on Snapchat. Instagram also announced that the world’s No. 1 female tennis star Serena Williams will be the first athlete to promote the new feature by sharing her travels and preparations leading up to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. (The first public figure to use it? That honor goes to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who shared a “story” with photos of his dog and baby.)

Might the addition of Stories cause users to go a little too crazy on Instagram and post too often? Instagram says no. In an announcement on its blog, Instagram tells users not to worry about over-posting and inundating their follows, because these stories appear in bubbles at the top of your regular Instagram feed. The row of bubbles will not follow as you scroll down through your feed; they stay at the very top. (Instagram calls it a “separate surface.”) Users can also choose to add the stories to their own profile, as with regular solo photos or videos.

Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours, just like Snapchat’s. Instagram users can draw and add text to photos, just like on Snapchat. Tap on a friend’s bubble to see their story, keep tapping to view the next slides in their story, and swipe to see the next person’s story, just like on Snapchat. Swipe up on your own story to see who has viewed it, just like on Snapchat. If you want to comment on the story, do what you do on Snapchat: send a private message.

There are really only a couple of tiny differences between Instagram’s stories and Snapchat’s: Instagram allows you to fit much more text on top of a photo, and allows you to vary the thickness of the writing tool. Those are granular details, but could provide a competitive advantage.

Mark Zuckerberg’s first Instagram Story

Instagram founder Kevin Systrom does not deny that the idea came from Snapchat, and told TechCrunch in an interview, “They deserve all the credit.”

If the Instagram Stories feature is so similar to Snapchat Stories, you might think Instagram users will be skeptical, and maybe hesitant to use it. But with 500 million monthly active users on Instagram compared to the roughly 150 million daily active users on Snapchat, Instagram has an automatic edge; its users will likely at least try the new feature out.

Then again, Snapchat is predicted to grow 27% this year, a bigger growth rate than its social competitors Facebook and Pinterest are expected to see, according to eMarketer. Instagram is feeling the pressure to keep up. It already followed the footsteps of parent company Facebook back in June by rolling out targeted advertising tools for small businesses.

Announcing the new feature now, and with Serena Williams attached, is no coincidence. This is Instagram’s Olympics play; Facebook made one too, as did Snapchat.

“We expect both athletes and fans to take full advantage of using Instagram Stories to share their experiences at the Games,” says Instagram. Some athletes and fans, no doubt, will indeed use the feature. But will they use it more than Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat?

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Minyoung Park is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more Olympics coverage from Yahoo Finance:

How to follow the Rio Olympics from your smartphone

The biggest business story at the Rio Olympics is this marketing rule change

Facebook challenges Twitter with new Olympics features

Here’s what the stock market does during the Summer Olympics

#serena williams #rio olympics #instagram #snapchat #olympics #Rio 2016 #video #Summer Olympics #snapchat stories #instagram stories #$FB #_yfinance:segment=the_final_round #_ymedia:video-channel=investing #_uuid:48f24a12-77cf-34c6-b7fe-8c4a4bc1e752 #_wp:54736

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Facebook challenges Twitter with new Olympics features

Facebook announced on Monday a slew of new features tailored to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. It is an effort to play into the biggest event in global sports, of course—but it’s also a competitive play against Twitter, which has jumped all-in on sports very recently and inked deals with the four biggest US leagues to live-stream games.

The first two features relate to profile pictures. The first, called Profile Frames, allows you to show the utmost enthusiasm for your country of choice by adding a frame around your profile picture. It puts the country’s flag and the Rio 2016 logo below your photo; it basically looks like a Snapchat filter.

The second feature has to be done through the separate mobile app MSQRD, a face-swapping tool Facebook acquired in March. During the Olympics, if you use the app to share photos or live-broadcast video, the flag of your choice can appear on your face like a mask. The filters will be available starting August 3.

flag face filter from MSQRD

The last feature is the most extensive: From August 1-5, Facebook will serve up an Olympics-related greeting in your News Feed. The greeting gives the option to click through to a page of “dynamic Olympic content” curated by Facebook, personalized to you, including news, “conversations,” live video and more. It will send out the greetings again during the Closing Ceremony on August 21.

It will be interesting to see if users enjoy or even notice the Olympics greeting content. Facebook has been adding more sports features recently, like Sports Stadium, which was billed as a place for live sports chat but is difficult to find and has failed to generate buzz.

Despite Facebook’s efforts, Twitter in many ways, for now, is the apparent leader for live, in-the-moment sports discussion. Its new deals with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL to live-stream games (the package details differ in each case) will only add to that reputation.

Almost every social platform has been seeking to rack up engagement around the Summer Olympics. NBC and Snapchat, for example, have partnered up to show live “stories” from Rio. But with so many logistical problems on the ground, and a number of big-name athletes dropping out, it’s unclear whether Facebook and Twitter will see as much excitement as they have in the past.

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Minyoung Park is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more Olympics coverage from Yahoo Finance:

How to follow the Rio Olympics from your smartphone

The biggest business story at the Rio Olympics is this marketing rule change

Here’s what the stock market does during the Summer Olympics

Instagram adds Snapchat-style feature just in time for Olympics

#facebook #rio olympics #snapchat #olympics #twitter #ri0 2016 #$FB #$twtr #_uuid:ce6f5f8c-1855-31f2-9444-440aaa4b39a4 #_wp:54288

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The declining labor participation rate isn’t about immigration

The labor-force participation rate, which measures the portion of American adults currently employed or looking for work, is frequently used as a key indicator of where the US economy stands. And according to a report this month from the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), the rate fell 5 percentage points between 2000 and 2015.

It is a troubling statistic. But contrary to what many pundits might like to pin it on, experts say the change is not due to immigration.

BPC finds that the decline is due to American-born workers’ increased inclination to turn to benefits like retirement, school enrollment and disability claims — that is, to leave the workforce.

According to the BPC report, between 2000 and 2015, the percentage of the US-born population (16 years old and up) either employed or actively seeking work dropped 5 percentage points. The percentage of the US-born population holding a job dropped 6 percentage points.

To be sure, immigration has been a hot topic in the current presidential campaign, in which Republican nominee Donald Trump has pinned much of the US economy’s woes on immigrants supposedly taking jobs.

“I think that it’s way too simplistic to say that the presence of immigrants drives native workers out of the work force,” Theresa Brown, BPC’s immigration policy director tells Yahoo Finance. The BPC report seeks to debunk the notion that immigrants are taking jobs; it examines retirement rate, school enrollment and disability claims from 2000 to 2015 as a way to explain the change in labor participation.

“The notion that immigrants displace workers is really a fallacy based on the idea that there is a fixed number of jobs in the economy and that one job that somebody else takes is one that somebody else can’t take,” says Kenneth Megan, a BPC policy analyst and the report’s author. “The reality is that the economy is dynamic and really depends on supply and demand.”

Foreign-born workers tend to face more barriers in the workforce than native-born workers: They are less likely to qualify for full Social Security benefits; they are less likely to qualify for federal disability programs due to having fewer work credit-hours; and lack of proficiency in English can limit their access to education.

While American-born workers don’t face these kinds of barriers, other forces like globalization have reduced employment in the US, particularly in manufacturing. And these outside forces could have a much bigger impact on employment than immigrants who take low-paid jobs in the US.

“Immigration is not the biggest problem that these groups have,” says Harry Holzer, professor of public policy at Georgetown University, referring to US-born workers who believe immigrants are taking their jobs. “These groups have been more adversely affected by digital technologies and other kinds of globalization like imports and exports and weakening unions.”

It also turns out that foreign and native workers often don’t target the same occupations anyway. “Immigrants and native-born workers do not usually compete for the same jobs,” says Silva Mathema, senior policy analyst at Center for American Progress. “Instead, many immigrants are complements to US workers.”

People love to argue about how much immigration affects American-born workers, but a better question is why, over the past 15 years, more American-born workers are turning to routes like retirement, school enrollment and disability claims earlier in life. Some potential explanations include baby boomers nearing retirement age, and “prime age” workers (25-54) dropping out of the labor force.

“I think a lot of it had to do with the great recession,” Kenneth Megan says. “If you lose your job and you are 50 years old and native-born American, you might opt to retire or go back to school. You are more likely to do that than in a good economic time.”

Contrary to what some politicians might like to say, many economist say that in the long run, immigrants are good for the American economy, and don’t displace American workers. “On average,” Silva Mathema says, “many have found that [immigrants] have a positive effect on native-born workers.”

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Minyoung Park is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

How the Supreme Court is hurting the economy by killing immigration reform

America’s brick-and-mortar retailers are vanishing

A mysterious US industry has been growing since the recession — psychic services

#donald trump #trump #economy #declining labor rate #labor rate #native born workers #american labor rate #immigration #_uuid:bc40f720-4090-30d9-878f-09224d854611 #_wp:45832

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Why Americans are working from home more than ever before

Forget the uncomfortable work clothes, forget annoying coworkers, forget lengthy in-person meetings. As the lines between work life and personal life get more blurred, workers are staying at home.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of full-time or part-time workers who do some or all of their work from home grew from 19% in 2003 to 24% in 2015.

Dan Schawbel, founder of the web site WorkplaceTrends, has been working from his home in New York for five years. A self-proclaimed introvert, he says he works best alone, away from frequent interruptions and distractions at an open office. “I feel like I have more control over my day when I work from home,” says Schawbel.

That preference is one that is shared by many. In fact, Schawbel says that flexibility at work is one of the top three benefits employees now demand. A WorkplaceTrends report finds that last year, 75% of employees ranked workplace flexibility as their top benefit, while 45% of employees felt they don’t have enough time each week to do personal activities.

This gripe may be a response to increasingly demanding workplaces, where managers expect employees to be reachable by email or phone outside of office hours. The same WorkplaceTrends report finds that 65% of employees say their manager expects them to be available outside of the office. Schawbel finds that the average work week is now 47 hours for full-time permanent employees, and 43 hours even for part-timers.

In other words: There is no 9-to-5 anymore.

Another influence behind this new trend is cultural. Experts say millennials, who recently surpassed Baby Boomers to become the largest group in the U.S. workforce, expect working conditions to be catered to individual preference.

“This trend is likely to continue to accelerate as Baby Boomers transition towards retirement but don’t fully retire, and millennials move up in the workforce and bring their work style preferences with them,” says Jason Dorsey, co-founder of The Center for Generational Kinetics.

Big companies like Aetna, Dell and Wells Fargo are among a ranking of the top 100 employers that offer the most work-from-home flexibility.

“Hiring people who work from home can extend your talent pool to help the best candidates, regardless of geography,” says Brian Reynolds, Director of Online Content at FlexJob, an online job service. “Also, if the business relies heavily on customer service and sales, being able to hire people in different time zones helps you to provide more customer service coverage, or extend your sales territory without having to rent or build office space.”

As the trend continues, expect more companies to hop on board and offer more make work-from-home flexibility, not less.

—

Minyoung Park is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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A mysterious US industry has been growing since the recession — psychic services

Source: John Stephen Dwyer/Wikimedia Commons

The US had a strong jobs report on Friday, with the Department of Labor noting the economy had added 287,000 jobs in June and 14.8 million jobs since February 2010.

One curious US industry has been growing along with the rest of the country’s economy: psychic services. While psychics’ business got hit by the recession, the industry been expanding steadily since 2010, according to an October report from IBISWorld, a publisher of business intelligence.

While you may have read your horoscope or even had your palm read, you might not think of fortune-telling as an “industry.” However, the IBISWorld report analyzes it as such and notes those in the industry — including people involved in palmistry, cartomancy, mediumship, aura readings and astrology — have about $2 billion in revenue a year. Roughly 85,000 people work in psychic services and make about $1.5 billion in total wages a year.

The IBISWorld report predicted the industry could do even better if the economy recovers more: “Improving economic conditions will continue to boost industry performance, as rising disposable income bolsters average customer spending on psychic services.”

So, who are the people who use these services?

The report notes that consumers who aren’t affiliated with a particular religion and those who are agnostic make up the majority of psychics’ customers. The increasing tendency of Americans not to affiliate with any particular religion bodes well for the world of psychics. As the report notes, “demand for industry services has grown in line with changing consumer beliefs.”

Psychics also include executives among their clients, at least according to a September report from Fortune’s Polina Marinova.

“I think people would be astounded at the amount of entrepreneurs that consult people like me,” astrologer Robert Ohotto told Fortune, which said his clients include high-level executives at Google. “Any entrepreneur that has been hugely successful either has a very well developed intuition of their own, or consults people who do.”

Of course, the psychic industry is not without its critics; in New York, several fortune tellers have even been convicted of grand larceny and sentenced to prison for scamming customers out of thousands of dollars. And in May, police arrested a 25-year-old New Jersey psychic who was accused of charging a customer $41,000 to remove an “unwanted spirit,” NJ.com reported.

Though the visit started with a $100 crystal ball reading, the psychic kept asking for more money, the customer told police. The client became suspicious and reported the situation to the police. The psychic was charged with theft by deception.

In response to scams, a number of cities have been introducing new regulations for psychics, the IBISWorld report notes: “An increasing number of regulations are attempting to limit fraud in the industry. Many cities require psychics to buy licenses to practice their services. Over the next five years, increased industry regulation could result in slightly heightened barriers to entry for psychics.”

There will probably always be a market for psychics, though. It seems like a good number of Americans either believe in the power of fortune telling or need affirmation that their future looks just fine.

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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The vast majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are here working: BAML

Demonstrators from the immigrant advocacy group CASA march in hopes of a Supreme Court ruling in their favor, June 20, 2016. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

With Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the topic of immigration will likely emerge as a major topic of debate during the general election.

Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, has framed the need for immigration reform as a family issue and an “economic issue” while calling for a “pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants.

Indeed, many undocumented immigrants in the US already contribute a great deal to the country’s economy, according to a new report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML). That report noted that in 2014 unauthorized immigrants had a labor force participation rate of 70% compared to 62.9% for the overall population.

Source: Bank of America Merrill Lynch

BAML also cited research that refutes the notion that America’s roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants might be “taking” jobs from US citizens.

“[A] study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that immigrants are imperfect substitutes for native US workers due to different occupation choices and skills and immigration has a positive effect on the average wage of US-born workers overall,” BAML noted.

Of course, new policies on immigration could change the economic situation for those who came to the US without authorization. The BAML report looks at two possible scenarios that could change the labor participation rate for undocumented immigrants — one of which Trump has proposed and the other of which Clinton has called for in the past.

The first scenario — which Trump has championed — would expand a program known as e-verify that lets businesses determine the eligibility of employees to work in US. If that program were mandated across the US for new hires, as Trump wants it to be, the labor force would shrink by 3.8 percentage points over the next 15 years, according to BAML. That would slice .1 percentage point from real GDP growth per year, and the federal debt-to-GDP ratio would be 1.5 percentage points higher at the end of a 15-year period.

BAML’s second scenario would benefit the economy and would involve increasing the number of H-1B visas (which let US companies hire foreign workers) and employment-based green cards issued. (Hillary Clinton spoke out back in 2007 in favor of increasing H-1B visas.) Meanwhile, this proposal would eliminate both green cards for the siblings of US citizens and diversity visas.

This move would boost the overall labor force by .7 percentage points over a 15-year period; increase real GDP by .7 percentage points; and lower the debt to GDP ratio by 1.1 percentage points.

Regardless of what form immigration reform takes, there is a growing call for it. That’s partly because the Supreme Court recently blocked President Barack Obama’s plan to help 4 million unauthorized immigrants live and work in the US without fear of deportation.

A 2009 report from the Council on Foreign Relations still seems relevant today, noting: “The continued failure to devise and implement a sound and sustainable immigration policy threatens to weaken America’s economy, to jeopardize its diplomacy, and to imperil its national security.”

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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How the UK's self-employed will help pull the economy out of the slump

A store closing sale in the City of London, June 24, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

James O’Malley, 29, sat in front of his TV roughly around 6 a.m. last week to watch the BBC deliver the results of the referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU.

He wasn’t pleased with the results. O’Malley has launched a petition calling for London to secede from the UK, and it already has more than 178,00 supporters. O’Malley, a freelance writer who’s an active Twitter user, fears the looming Brexit could trigger a recession in the UK.

“I’m a freelancer and obviously when there’s a recession, freelancers tend to be the first to get hit, so that worries me,” he told Yahoo Finance.

Many others may share his worries — particularly other self-employed Britons. Currently, there are 4.7 million self-employed workers in the UK, which is 15% of all UK employees, according to the most recent Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) monthly labor force survey from June.

But self-employed Britons may be the most in-demand workers and the ones who will help the economy during these uncertain times. An estimated 1.91 million freelance workers in the UK contribute £109 billion, around $145 billion, to the UK economy, according to a 2015 report by The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE). The report defines freelancers as highly qualified professionals in managerial, creative, or technical roles — a fraction of the 4.7 million self-employed people in the UK.

The flexible workforce has been widely acknowledged by business groups and politicians as playing a vital role in the UK economy, according to Julia Kermode, chief executive of The Freelancer and Contractor Services Association (FCSA).

“We are entering a period where stability is needed, and the flexible workforce will play a key role in achieving this and ensuring the UK’s economy doesn’t suffer,” Kermode told Yahoo Finance. She explained that contractors or self-employed workers helped the UK recover from its last recession because they were able to scale up or down according to need.

Dave Chaplin, CEO of ContractorCalculator, a site that gives advice to contractors and freelancers, has a similar mindset. “Contractors, and the rest of the UK’s highly skilled knowledge-based flexible workforce, are ready to make Brexit work,” Chaplin told Yahoo Finance. “There will be a whole host of areas for opportunity, particularly in IT and finance, to prepare us for the post-Brexit economy.”

He added: “Also, many firms in this period of uncertainty may have headcount freezes, but the work still needs doing, and contractors will be able to fill those resource gaps.”

The impacts of the Brexit on the UK economy will be unknown for a while, and self-employed Britons like contractors and freelancers could benefit from the uncertainty since firms may not want to commit to hiring permanent employees.

“One of the greatest assets the UK economy has particularly when you compare it to our European neighbors is that we have a diverse thriving flexible labour market,” says Andrew Chamberlain, deputy director of policy at IPSE. “Remain optimistic and look for opportunities because I think that there will be quite a few opportunities to spring out of this. If you’re a highly skilled person and you are able to offer your skills in a flexible basis, I think that’s going to be even more attractive in a time of uncertainty than any way.”

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minyoungparkyahoo-blog · 9 years ago

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What's next for Europe? Here are 3 broad scenarios

Which door will Europe pick?

The UK’s surprising decision last week to leave the EU has stirred up confusion as to what will happen to Britain, Europe and the rest of the world in the wake of the Brexit.

We do know the Brexit will likely lead to years of negotiation as the UK works out its new relationship with the EU. In a recent note, Torsten Slok, chief international economist and managing director of Deutsche Bank, suggests three possible broad scenarios for a post-Brexit Europe.

The first scenario Slok lays out involves the EU “muddling through,” which he calls a “default strategy” for the EU.

Slok predicts that the “business as usual” outcome will be the most likely scenario post-Brexit. The EU is known for resisting change — in part because of its bureaucratic nature. Even during the European Council meeting on Tuesday in Brussels, 28 EU leaders spent roughly three hours discussing their own bureaucracy before getting around to talking about the exit of Britain, Washington Post reported, noting that the Brexit itself was at least partly a rejection of EU’s red-tape-filled processes.

The second scenario could involve “dissolution tensions,” with Brexit triggering other countries to leave the EU. Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right UK Independence Party, suggested on the morning of Brexit the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark might be next to leave the EU. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National in France, also suggested her country may be last to leave.

Slok calls the third scenario “integration leap,” laying out a situation where the UK’s exit makes the existing 27 members become stronger. In that scenario, the remaining EU members would work together to ramp up security in the Eurozone and get rid of some of the bureaucracy that has slowed down decision-making. Slok isn’t the first person to suggest the Brexit could strengthen the EU.

On Friday, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves expressed his hope for cooperation and unity between the remaining EU members, according to The Baltic Times.

“What the decision to leave means for the United Kingdom and the European Union politically and economically cannot be predicted in full yet,” he said. “Personally, I hope that it will have a unifying effect on the EU 27.”

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