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
CBO and the Minimum Wage, PT. 2
In a post Wednesday , I reviewed a long list of ways in which Tuesday’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report embraced arguments made by supporters of the minimum wage. In this post, I want to make some observations on CBO’s analysis of the employment
CBO and the Minimum Wage
You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but on almost every issue in dispute, yesterday’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the minimum wage sided with supporters of increasing the federal wage floor. The only major exception –which has so far
Union Advantage for Black Workers
February 2014, Janelle Jones and John Schmitt
When Mandates Work
My copy of When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards at the Local Level, edited by Michael Reich, Ken Jacobs, and Miranda Dietz, arrived earlier this week and I finally had a chance to look through it this weekend. The book is a collection of papers tha
Hoffman on Sabia, Burkhauser, and Hansen on the Minimum Wage
In a 2012 paper published in the peer-reviewed Industrial and Labor Relations Review (ILRReview), economists Joseph Sabia, Richard Burkhauser, and Benjamin Hansen concluded that the 39 percent increase in the New York state minimum wage in 2005-2007 (fro
SOTU Minimum Wage FAQ
In Tuesday’s State of the Union address President Obama will likely repeat the call made he made in last year’s speech to raise the federal minimum wage. Just in case, here’s an FAQ on the minimum wage.
Union Membership Byte 2014
January 24, 2014 (Union Membership Byte)
More on Meer and West’s Minimum Wage Study
In July, economists Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West made a splash with a new paper arguing that even though the minimum wage doesn’t appear to have much effect on the level of employment (a position that should make more traditional critics of the minimum w
Union Membership, 2013
The number of union members rose 162,000 in 2013, reflecting a drop of 118,000 in the public sector that was offset by a rise of 281,000 in the private sector. Expressed as a share of the workforce, the union membership rate was unchanged in 2013, at 11.3
Minimum Wage and Poverty
University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube (on leave this spring at MIT) has an excellent new paper looking at the impact of the minimum wage on the federal poverty rate. In the past, I have generally relied on analyses along the lines of this