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
Young, Educated and Jobless in America?
Today’s New York Times has a piece by Steven Erlanger on the “Young, Educated and Jobless in France” that gets most of the facts right, but still might leave its readers with the wrong idea about the real labor-market challenges facing Europe and the Unit
The States and Full Employment
State governments spend a lot of money — usually in the form of tax breaks for companies — trying to bring jobs to their states. The problem with this kind of race-to-the-bottom strategy is that the most they can hope to achieve is to shift jobs from one
Part-time Work Isn’t Driving Inequality
Bad Jobs, Infographic Edition!
The Minimum Wage as an Anti-Inequality Policy
I am a big fan of the kind of journalistic exercise that David Leonhardt recently launched at the New York Times Economix blog. He has decided to take a long, detailed look, in multiple installments, at “The 14 Potential Causes of the Income Slump.” Yeste
Bad Jobs on the Rise
September 2012, John Schmitt and Janelle Jones
Labor Day Lessons From Canada
A Closer Look at Good Jobs By Education Level
Over the last few days, several blogs have commented on the chart below from a recent CEPR report (pdf) that Janelle Jones and I did on “Good Jobs.” (See, for example, Kevin Drum, Brad Plumer at WonkBlog, Andrew Sullivan, and ThinkProgress.) The graph sh
Technology or Power?
Why Don’t We Feel 63 Percent Richer?
I don’t think the average non-economist appreciates just how much richer and more productive the U.S. economy is today than it was three decades ago. For the typical American, the large increase in economic inequality has masked most, if not all, of the p