The Southern economic development model has failed to create shared prosperity in the region. In fact, this model was deliberately designed to do the opposite—to extract the labor of Black and brown...

Higher top marginal rates could reduce incentives of the privileged to rig the economy, writes Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute.

Abortion has long been framed as a cultural, religious, or personal issue rather than a material “bread and butter” economic concern. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, more economic...

The battle over the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has clearly begun in earnest. A striking feature of this debate is the disconnect between commonly cited complaints about the ACA and...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a reality that U.S. workers have long confronted—U.S. labor law fails to protect working people. For decades, union leaders and workers’ rights advoca...

If the 2021 Raise the Wage Act were passed and the federal hourly minimum wage increased to $15 by 2025, we estimate that annual government expenditures on major public assistance programs would fall...

Summary The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would help eliminate poverty-level wages by raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. This report finds that the raise is long overdue and...

48 states saw real median household income growth decline in Trump's first two years, some dramatically.

In this report, we document the correlation between higher levels of unionization in states and a range of economic, personal, and democratic well-being measures. In the same way unions give workers...

Wealth is a crucially important measure of economic health. Wealth allows families to transfer income earned in the past to meet spending demands in the future, such as by building up savings to...

The inflation spike of 2021 and 2022 has presented real policy challenges. In order to better understand this policy debate, it is imperative to look at prices and how they are being affected. The...

Abortion has long been framed as a cultural, religious, or personal issue rather than a material “bread and butter” economic concern. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, more economic...

This week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy plans to hold a vote on a bill that would raise the nation’s debt limit, but only in conjunction with extraordinarily steep spending cuts and new...

Investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing, analysis of national and world affairs, and cultural criticism that matters.

The huge gap between rising incomes at the top and stagnating pay for the rest of us shows that workers are no longer benefiting from their rising productivity. Before 1979, worker pay and producti...

Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute There is now widespread acceptance across the political spectrum that the typical worker’s wages have grown very slowly or been stagnant for...

What this report finds: States across the country are attempting to weaken child labor protections, just as violations of these standards are rising. This report identifies bills weakening child...

Today, Congress introduced the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, which will raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, index it to median wages to protect against future erosion, and phase out...

A major factor depressing wage growth for middle earners and driving the growth of wage inequality over the last four decades has been the erosion of collective bargaining. The share of workers...

Abortion has long been framed as a cultural, religious, or personal issue rather than a material “bread and butter” economic concern. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, more economic...

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination this year, it is important to remember that African Americans continue to face many of the same inequalities...

As strange as this might sound, the actual economic cost of inflation is often hard to identify. One might think that it’s obvious that if inflation rises from 0% to 5% then the purchasing power of...

Thousands are expected this week in the forested hills of southern West Virginia to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain—a key conflict in labor history. In the late...

Newly available wage data tell a familiar story: In every period since 1979, wages for the bottom 90% were continuously redistributed upward to the top 10% and frequently to the very highest 1.0% and...

The voices of Black economists have been largely absent from the recent media coronavirus coverage. Over the past month, for example, The New York Times, which has become one of the primary sources...

Recent reports indicate that the debt limit “X-date” could come as early as June 1. On this X-date, the U.S. Treasury will no longer have enough cash in its accounts at the Federal Reserve to meet...