Labor economics.

If you are at all interested in the current state of labor economics research (and really, who isn't?), you should read this interesting interview with Berkeley economist David Card, where he gives a high-level overview of his research since the early 90s. He is a brilliant academic, and he has contributed some ground-breaking work to a large number of the important issues of the past 20 years.

You may have heard the name from the New York Times magazine article about economists' views on immigration (where he lead the "not such a big deal" camp; check out his research), and his name shows up in popular debates about the growing inequality. Some of the interview is a bit technical, but the parts on immigration, returns to education, minimum wage and skill-biased technical change are all worth a minute (or several) of your workday time. Excerpt:

[Card] For example, what does it mean for a firm to have a vacancy? If a firm can readily go to the market and buy a worker, there's no such thing as a vacancy, or at least not a persistent vacancy. During the early 1990s, when Alan and I were working on minimum wages, it was our perception that many low-wage employers had had vacancies for months on end. Actually many fast-food restaurants had policies that said, "Bring in a friend, get him to work for us for a week or two and we'll pay you a $100 bonus." These policies raised the question to us: Why not just increase the wage?

From the perspective of a search paradigm, these policies make sense, but they also mean that each employer has a tiny bit of monopoly power over his or her workforce. As a result, if you raise the minimum wage a little–not a huge amount, but a little–you won't necessarily cause a big employment reduction. In some cases you could get an employment increase…