By Bullard Law, Portland law firm According to the National Labor Relations Board website, the Board “protects the rights of most private-sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions.” In practice, the Board does not always adhere to this idealistic view […]

By Jan Meekcoms Oregon NFIB (Originally published in Salem Business Journal) It’s an election year, which means it’s time to drag the old tax-reform issue out of the attic and blow the cobwebs off of it. Just how important are tax issues to small business? In a survey of small […]

By Walter Olson CATO Institute A former employee has filed a lawsuit charging that Vanguard Group, the gigantic ($2 trillion under management) and very successful mutual fund company, provides services to the funds it manages at “artificially low,” “at-cost” prices, which may be beneficial to investors in those funds but […]

By Technology Association of Oregon. Maybe it’s just the season: It’s the end of summer and time to get back to work. It seems like several tech companies in Portland checked their fall forecasts and decided they needed to ramp up new talent hires to meet the coming workload. eBay […]

Gert Boyle: From $100M secret donor to video humor By Oregon Small Business Association It was a mystery on who donated $100 million to OHSU this year. After some media pressure OHSU decided to make public their previously secret donor on their Facebook page and also a You Tube video […]

By Oregon Employment Department by Nick Beleiciks As of January 1, 2014, Oregon’s minimum wage is $9.10. Oregon has the second highest minimum wage in the nation behind our neighbor to the north, Washington, at $9.32. Nationwide, the minimum wage is $7.25. Over the past decade in Oregon, the minimum […]

Patrick Emerson PhD , OSU Economist Oregon Economics Blog I pop my head up above the earth to post this little gem from the wonderful New York Times’ Upshot blog. They have one for each state and it is some fun clicking. The graphic here does not label the vertical […]

By Josh Lehner Oregon Office of Economic Analysis Blog This Graph of the Week is an update on the Oregon spider chart. See here for more on the construction of the graph which follows the pioneering work by the Atlanta Fed at the national level. As a reminder the chart […]

Associated Oregon Industries Oregon’s largest business advocate by Betsy Earls At first glance, the cities of Troutdale and Eugene aren’t much the same. But they have one thing in common, both are located in “home rule” counties. Nine counties in Oregon, including Lane and Multnomah, operate under home rule charters, […]

California Lutheran University Housing is traditionally a very volatile sector of the economy. It tends to lead the business sector (indeed, some economists like Ed Leamer of the UCLA Forecasting Group say that housing IS the business cycle). Housing is subject to booms and busts. A case in point is […]