EPI Research (Page 3 )

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  The National Impact of a $15 Minimum Wage: Over 2 Million Jobs Lost

  January 2021

  President Biden and recent legislation have proposed more than doubling the federal minimum wage to $15, and raising the separate federal tipped minimum wage by as much as 600 percent. Rather than providing relief from the pandemic, the best economic evidence shows this proposal would worsen its consequences. This analysis is based on a 2019 methodology developed by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimated…
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  The State Employment Impact of a $15 Minimum Wage: January 2021

  January 2021

  The crisis created by the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent shutdowns has severely affected America’s employees and businesses, and state economies still face a long road to full recovery to pre-pandemic activity levels. As part of his pandemic relief plan, President Biden has proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and eliminating the tip credit—a plan that is estimated to cost over 2 million…
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  The State Employment Impact of a $15 Minimum Wage

  October 2020

  The crisis created by the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent shutdowns has severely affected employees and businesses, regardless of industry. The U.S. faced a 14.7 percent unemployment rate at its peak in April 2020, as a direct result of the virus outbreak, and although it has declined to 8.4 percent in the month of August, the nation’s businesses and employees still face a long road…
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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…