One of the hardest questions in economics is mobility versus stability. What happens to workers who are displaced by recessions, technological and industrial change, regional shifts, or corporate failure? Can humans move fluidly from occupation to occupation, industry to industry, and city to city, like interchangeable parts in a well-oiled economic machine, always going to where their contributions will be ...

China’s economic performance is all about what hasn’t happened. That’s huge. The world’s No. 2 economy didn’t implode under a mountain of debt, nor did trade tensions with the US bring exports undone. And there certainly hasn’t been the trade war many feared a year ago. The country’s growing reliance on services and consumption as an engine of growth — ...

Many predicted that the beginning of last year would finally bring an uptick in volatility. Instead, 2017 was one of the least volatile periods on record for the stock market. The S&P 500 was up every month. The largest peak-to-trough drawdown was slightly more than 3 percent, the lowest on record since at least the mid-1990s. And this phenomenon isn’t ...