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 research 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 EITC. 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. His new work is focused on re-evaluating some core findings in the recent minimum wage literature, including using cross-border designs to estimate effects of minimum wages on employment, and evidence that monopsony weakens the job loss effects of minimum wages.

Mr. Neumark has made research contributions in numerous areas of labor economics that intersect with important public policy issues. His research on labor market discrimination has opened up new methods of measuring discrimination. Mr. Neumark has authored many studies on age discrimination and the economics of aging. Recently, he has studied how stronger age discrimination laws complement policy reforms intended to increase labor supply of older workers, conducted a large-scale field experiment testing for age discrimination, and developed methods to test for age stereotypes in job ads and explore how these influence job search of older workers.

While at CESifo he hopes to further develop the new work on discrimination and minimum wages, in part by drawing on the expertise of institute researchers.

David Neumark is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy at the University of California, 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 he is currently a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has been a co-editor of the Journal of Urban Economics, an editor of the IZA Journal of Labor Policy, and has served on the editorial board of numerous journals. He is a CESifo Research Network Fellow, an IZA Research Fellow and a NEPR Research Associate. His PhD in Economics is from Harvard University.