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
Studying the Studies on the Minimum Wage
In a full page ad in today’s Politico, the conservative Employment Policies Institute (not to be confused with the progressive Economic Policy Institute) claims that “85 percent of the most credible economic research from the last 20 years” demonstrates t
Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out
The latest issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal, Gender and Society, has an excellent paper by Rachel Dwyer, Randy Hodson, and Laura McCloud on “Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out of College” (which is, unfortunately, behind a paywall). The new paper f
Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?
February 2013, John Schmitt
State Union Membership, 2012
On January 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its estimates for union membership in the United States in 2012. This post focuses on the union membership numbers by state. In addition to presenting the BLS estimates for overall union members
Raising the Social Security Payroll Tax Cap: How Many Workers Would Pay More?
January 2013, Nicole Woo, Janelle Jones and John Schmitt
Public-Sector Union Numbers, 2012
Union Membership, 2012
On January 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its estimates of “Union Membership” for 2012. Using the same data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we have compiled advance estimates for union membership and coverage for 2012 and find a
Union Membership Byte 2013
January 17, 2013 (Union Membership Byte)
Job Polarization in the 2000s?
In a recent post at Wonkblog, Dylan Matthews takes a fairly dim view of a new paper that Larry Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and I have written on the role of technology in wage inequality. Matthews raises several issues, but I want to focus right now on a key
Having Your Minimum Wage and EITC, Too
Economic commentator Evan Soltas really missed the boat in his most recent Bloomberg column on the minimum wage. He gets some of the economics right —the best empirical evidence on the minimum wage, he notes, for example, “find[s] small, if any, impacts o