Research

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  Raising the Tipped Wage Reduces Opportunity for Tipped Workers

  November 2019

  Over five million Americans currently work in restaurants as tipped servers or bartenders in restaurants. By one estimate, nearly one in three American workers worked in the restaurant industry as their first job. Despite the industry’s popularity as a place of employment, it has been the subject in recent years of a well-funded attack by a labor group called the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC). ROC [...]
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  Do Minimum Wage Increases Reduce Crime?

  March 2019

  Advocates have recently claimed that minimum wage increases may actually make our neighborhoods safer.  By raising workers’ wages, the argument goes, legitimate labor market work will be more attractive to potential criminals and crime will fall. But what about those who lose their jobs?  My new research, co-authored with Zachary Fone of the University of New Hampshire and Resul Cesur of the University of Connecticut, finds [...]
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  Survey of US Economists on a $15 Federal Minimum Wage

  March 2019

  Across the nation, lawmakers continue to grapple with the viability and impact of increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The debate has become heated and some states and cities have already enacted increases they believe will benefit workers. While the true impact of these increases is still being discovered, recent surveys of businesses, franchises and other groups suggest that such minimum wage raises may actually harm workers, [...]
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  The Impact of a $15 Minimum Wage: Up to 2 Million Jobs Lost

  January 2019

  Speaker Nancy Pelosi boasted that a $15 minimum wage would pass “in the first 100 hours” of a new Democratic-controlled Congress. It might be good politics, but is a $15 minimum wage good economics? This month, the Employment Policies Institute released its first-ever book on the $15 minimum wage, “Fighting $15: An Evaluation of the Evidence and a Case for Caution.” This policy brief summarizes [...]
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  Fighting $15?: An Evaluation of the Evidence and a Case for Caution

  January 2019

  Click here for a policy brief of the book's findings. In his 2013 State of the Union, President Obama called for a 25 percent increase in the federal minimum wage, to $9 an hour. Five years later, the Democratic Party promised a minimum wage increase of more than 100 percent, to $15 an hour. This radical evolution in what constitutes an acceptable minimum wage can be [...]
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  Helping Without Hurting: The Long-run Effects of Anti-Poverty Policies on Disadvantaged Neighborhoods

  June 2018

  Decades of economic research and policymaking have focused on minimum wages, tax credits, and welfare programs as essential tools to improve the lives of struggling and disadvantaged Americans. In this new study, economists David Neumark and Brittany Bass of the University of California, Irvine, and Brian Asquith of the National Bureau of Economic research, measure the longrun effects of minimum wages, the Earned Income Tax Credit [...]