As fast-food workers join picket lines around the country, media outlets are questioning how much a minimum wage increase would cost businesses, fast-food restaurants in particular. Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin examine the potential impact of a proposal to raise the federal minimum...

The City of New Haven is considering outsourcing its public school custodial services to a private firm. Outsourcing would cut the cost of services in half, saving the city $8.1 million, or 19% percent of the deficit. But in this analysis of the impacts of the cuts, Jeannette Wicks-Lim finds...

In a new study by Yelowitz “Santa Fe’s Wage Ordinance and the Labor Market,” dated September 23, 2005 (published by the Employment Policies Institute) Yelowitz claims to have demonstrated that the Santa Fe living wage ordinance is responsible for significant, negative consequences for...

The vast majority of Americans work for a living. The track record of different states varies widely when it comes to providing decent opportunities for working people. The Work Environment Index (WEI) captures these differences and provides a basis for evaluating how well each state does in...

Minimum wage laws have become a key political issue, following on the heels of over 130 successful living wage campaigns around the country. In the debates surrounding these mandated wage floors, one recurring issue has been whether the legislation has wider-ranging impacts on wages than the...

Drawing on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), David Neumark (2002) finds that living wage laws have brought substantial wage increases for a high proportion of workers in cities that have passed these laws. He also finds that living wage laws significantly reduce employment...

This study, co-commissioned by Natural Resources Defense Council and Green For All, considers the employment and other policy effects of a $150 billion annual investment in clean-energy specifically in terms of its ability to raise living standards for lower-income workers and families. This...

Did the presence of immigrant workers in the United States labor market—including both documented and undocumented workers—significantly affect conditions for low-wage native workers during the Great Recession of 2008-09?   Building from the methodology developed by Card (2005), our basic...

Current federal policies to ‘make work pay’ leave the vast majority―88%―of low-income working families in the U.S. without the guarantee of a decent living standard, even with full-time work. In their new study, Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Jeffrey Thompson advance proposals to substantially...