John is a senior research fellow at CEPR, where he was a senior economist between 2005 and 2015. He later worked as the Research Director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Vice President of the Economic Policy Institute.
He has published peer-reviewed research on a range of labor market issues including unemployment, wage inequality, the minimum wage, unionization, immigration, technology, racial inequality, mass incarceration, and other topics. His research has been cited widely in the media including The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
His popular writing has appeared in The American Prospect, Boston Review, BusinessWeek.com, Challenge, Democracy, Dissent, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Salon, The Washington Post, and other publications. Schmitt co-authored three editions of The State of Working America and co-edited Low-Wage Work in the Wealthy World (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).
From 1999 through 2015, he was a regular visiting professor in public policy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. In the 1990s, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador, and later worked as an information officer for the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL).
He has a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and an A.B. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.
All from John Schmitt
Low-wage Workers Are Older and Better Educated than Ever
April 2012, John Schmitt and Janelle Jones
Issue Brief Finds Low-wage Workers Are Older and Better Educated than Ever
Relative to any of the most common benchmarks – the cost of living, the wages of the average worker, or average productivity levels – the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is well below its historical value. These usual reference points, howe
College Comparisons
Paul Krugman has reproduced an OECD chart that was featured in a recent post by Jared Bernstein. The graph of interest (below) contrasts the share of older and younger people in OECD countries that have the equivalent of a four-year college degree or mor
Affording Health Care and Education on the Minimum Wage
The current value of the federal minimum wage — $7.25 per hour — is often compared to the cost of living, the average wage in the economy, or the productivity of the average worker. By all of these benchmarks, the current federal minimum is well below its
New CEPR Issue Brief Shows Minimum Wage Has Room to Grow
It is coming up on three years since the last increase in the federal minimum wage –to $7.25 per hour– in July 2009. By all of the most commonly used benchmarks – inflation, average wages, and productivity – the minimum wage is now far below its histo
The Minimum Wage Is Too Damn Low
March 2012, John Schmitt
Jobs Day
Demographics of Long-Term Hardship
Long-Term Hardship in the Labor Market
March 2012, John Schmitt and Janelle Jones
Borderline
Yesterday’s New York Times has a high-production-values piece on differences in the recent labor-market performance of France and Germany. Reporter Steven Erlanger, whose foreign reporting I’ve admired in other contexts, builds the story around a comparis