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
$12 by 2020
Senator Patty Murray and Representative Bobby Scott introduced a bill yesterday that would increase the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $12.00 by 2020. In a paper also released yesterday, David Cooper and Lawrence Mishel
We Can Afford a $12.00 Federal Minimum Wage in 2020
April 2015, David Cooper, Lawrence Mishel and John Schmitt
Disunited States of America
I have a chapter on state-level labor-market regulations in a new ILR Press book edited by David Jacobs (Morgan State University) and Peggy Kahn (University of Michigan, Flint). The book is called Disunited States of America: Employment Relations Systems
Failing on Two Fronts: The U.S. Labor Market Since 2000
February 2015, John Schmitt
Union Membership Byte 2015
January 23, 2015 (Union Membership Byte)
Who Would Pay More if the Social Security Payroll Tax Cap Were Raised or Scrapped?
January 2015, Nicole Woo, Cherrie Bucknor, and John Schmitt
European and American Labor Markets in the Crisis
November 2014, John Schmitt
Does the OECD Think That the South Should Rise Again?
A post at Wonkblog earlier this month noted that a recent analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of regional well-being across its member countries found that the U.S. South was “the worst place to live in the United
Wage Inequality: A Story of Policy Choices
Beyond Stagnation: An Alternative Economic Strategy
John Schmitt and Mark LevinsonDissent, Summer 2014