David Neumark

Minimum Wage Research

David Neumark was one of the original contributors to the “new minimum wage research”, helping to pioneer the use of state-level minimum wage variation to estimate minimum wage effects. His subsequent work moved well beyond the debate over employment effects, to original and influential contributions on the effects of minimum wages on the income distribution, long-run effects of minimum wages on human capital and earnings, and complementarities between minimum wages and the Earned Income Tax Credit (the US version of in-work benefits). In related work, he was the first to assemble data and explore methods to study the effects of city living-wage laws, as well as contributing to understanding the political economy of these laws.

David Neumark has made significant research contributions in numerous areas of labour economics that intersect with important public policy issues. His research on labour market discrimination has opened up new methods of measuring discrimination. He has also authored numerous studies on the measurement of age discrimination in labour markets and tests of alternative models of the age-earnings profile. Recently, he has studied how stronger age discrimination laws complement policy reforms intended to increase the labour supply of older workers, and he has conducted a large-scale field experiment testing for age discrimination.

Mr Neumark’s current research agenda, as part of his activities as Director of ESSPRI, concern the long-run effects of alternative anti-poverty policies on earnings, income, poverty and public assistance receipt (broadly defined as “economic self-sufficiency”). While visiting CESifo, he will be working on research on the long-term effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit and presenting a new paper on the topic.

David Neumark is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute (ESSPRI) at UC Irvine. He has previously held positions at the Federal Reserve Board, the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University and the Public Policy Institute of California, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and a senior research fellow at the Workers Compensation Research Institute. His PhD in Economics is from Harvard University.