Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim consider the economic impact of two living wage proposals for Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee. Pollin and Wicks-Lim look at the overall costs of each proposal, which offer a wage of $10.80 per hour and health insurance benefits to two alternative pools...

To honor the life work of Professor Sumner Rosen, this lecture examines approaches to promoting full employment at decent jobs within our contemporary era of globalization. The lecture briefly summarizes the theories of unemployment of Marx, Friedman, Keynes and Kalecki. It then addresses the...

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...

This paper first examines the question “what is a living wage” and provides a range of specific dollar amounts derived a conceptual assessment of the term. I then provide a series of cost estimates of living wage laws in various cities. Based on these cost estimates, I examine a set of...

This paper presents new non-linear regression estimates of the relationship between inflation and economic growth for 80 countries over the period 1961 – 2000. We perform tests using the full sample of countries as well as sub-samples consisting of OECD countries, middle-income countries, and...

The war in Iraq is a strategic and moral disaster. But one issue relating to the war that hasn’t been addressed in depth is its impact on the U.S. economy. In the first of a series of research papers that will consider this issue, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier consider the impact of...