We wade into the heated debate over immigrants' impact on the labor market. When the number of workers in a city increases, does that take away jobs from the people who already live and work there? Does a surge of immigration hurt their wages?

The debate within the field of economics often centers on Nobel-prize winner David Card's ground-breaking paper, "The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market." Today on the show: the fight over that paper, and what it tells us about the debate over immigration.

More Listening:
- When The Boats Arrive
- The Men on the Roof

This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Annie Brown, and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

There's a behind the scenes industry that helps big brands decide questions like: How big should a bag of chips be? What's the right size for a bottle of shampoo? And yes, also: When should a company do a little shrinkflation?

From Cookie Monster to President Biden, everybody is complaining about shrinkflation these days. But when we asked the packaging and pricing experts, they told us that shrinkflation is just one move in a much larger, much weirder 4-D chess game.

The name of that game is "price pack architecture." This is the idea that you shouldn't just sell your product in one or two sizes. You should sell your product in a whole range of different sizes, at a whole range of different price points. Over the past 15 years, price pack architecture has completely changed how products are marketed and sold in the United States.

Today, we are going on a shopping cart ride-along with one of those price pack architects. She's going to pull back the curtain and show us why some products are getting larger while others are getting smaller, and tell us about the adorable little soda can that started it all.

By the end of the episode, you'll never look at a grocery store the same way again.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

In 1994, a crew of sailors pulled off a daring rescue in the middle of a tropical storm. To their surprise, their efforts would be rewarded thanks to an ancient law of the sea.

NPR staffers recommend non-fiction reads from our Books We Love list: "On Minimalism," "Anansi's Gold," "Asian-Americans in an Anti-Black World," and "The Wager."

At a surprisingly large number of hospitals, the pager remains the backbone of communication. The Planet Money team tries to understand why the pager has been so hard to replace.

Typically, when demand for a product goes up, so does the price. But at Thanksgiving, when demand for turkeys is at its highest, turkey prices drop. Our Planet Money team looks into this mystery.

All-you-can-eat buffets highlight an economic idea known as the flat rate pricing bias. To explain how it works, our Planet Money team went to the buffet capital of America: Las Vegas.

Going back more than a century, the month of September has been — on average — the worst month for the stock market. And September 2023 appears to be no exception. But why?

A team of investigators has been trying to get to the bottom of the biggest cryptocurrency theft of all time.

AI can now be trained to realistically imitate the voices of celebrities. The Planet Money podcast explore this new world of synthetic voices.

When Barbara Thorpe died in 2002, she left almost all of her money — $200,000 — to benefit the cats of her hometown, Dixfield, Maine. But that decision turned into a huge legal battle.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act lets you recover up to $500 for each violation of the do not call registry. Nathen Barton fought back against telemarketers, and made some money in the process.

It's gotten a lot tougher to poll voters these days. People aren't picking up the phone, nobody wants to talk to pollsters and it's becoming a crisis for the polling industry.

Between 1976 and 1999, hundreds of federal judges traveled to a private retreat where they learned from famous economists. These retreats may have had a surprising effect on federal courts.

A growing shortage for neon is driving up its prices by 5000%. Neon production became highly concentrated in post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Russia. The world is paying for that concentration.