Business

Unemployment has fallen, and the stock market has soared. So why has the economic expansion since the recession been so tame, with sluggish productivity and, at least until recently, anemic wage growth? Economists say the answer, to some degree, can be found in a start-up slump — a decline in ...

Eduardo Porter ECONOMIC SCENE Is a new golden age for the American worker around the corner? For the last couple of years, workers’ median earnings have been rising on a sustained path not seen in years. This may come as a surprise after decades of wage stagnation, when the good ...

The Shift By KEVIN ROOSE While running errands the other day, I ducked into a local Best Buy to pick up a pair of new headphones. What I saw inside was shocking. Happy-looking people were huddled around tables filled with the latest gadgets from Microsoft and Apple. The video game ...

On a muggy, late spring evening, Tuan Pham awoke to the police storming his house in Hanoi, Vietnam. They marched him to a police station and made their demand: Hand over your Facebook password. Mr. Tuan, a computer engineer, had recently written a poem on the social network called “Mother’s ...

SAN FRANCISCO — We expect a lot from our computers these days. They should talk to us, recognize everything from faces to flowers, and maybe soon do the driving. All this artificial intelligence requires an enormous amount of computing power, stretching the limits of even the most modern machines. Now, ...

SAN FRANCISCO — At Upload, the parties never seemed to stop. The start-up began by hosting impromptu gatherings to promote virtual reality as the next big thing. It quickly became an entertainment and news hub for the VR industry, hosting hundreds of events. The crowds were young and eager to ...

Fair Game By GRETCHEN MORGENSON The stunning data breach recently disclosed by Equifax, one of the nation’s top three credit reporting agencies, has imperiled millions of consumers, opening them up to identity theft, monetary losses and colossal headaches. Equifax investors are also shouldering the burden associated with the company’s apparently ...

SAN FRANCISCO — For months, the text messages came. Some were flirtatious, asking her to meet him late at night. Sometimes, the texts were sexually explicit. The messages were directed at Laura Munoz, an executive assistant at the online lending start-up Social Finance. The texts were from her boss, Mike ...

WASHINGTON — Despite eight years of economic growth since a brutal recession, some politicians and economists have worried that many Americans have not felt the benefits of the expansion. On Tuesday, the Census Bureau painted a brighter picture, suggesting that the recovery had shifted into a new phase in recent ...

Wagering that the new federal health care law would be a boon, the billionaire investor Larry Robbins bet big on hospital stocks five years ago. Those investments helped propel his hedge fund, Glenview Capital Management, to the ranks of the top-performing funds in 2013. Since then, the bet has soured. ...