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The employment effect of the minimum wage is one of the most studied topics in all of economics. This report examines the most recent wave of this research – roughly since 2000 – to determine the best current estimates of the impact of increases in the minimum wage on the employment prospects of low-wage workers. ...

When Congress was debating the Medicare drug benefit in 2003, there were many who advocated that Medicare provide the benefit as part of the traditional hospital insurance program. This was expected to save money both due to lower administrative costs and also as result of Medicare’s ability to use its market power to directly negotiate ...

1. Private markets, rather than the GSEs, created the subprime mortgage boom. The subprime mortgage boom and the subsequent crash are very much concentrated in the private market, not the public market. Subprime is a creature of the private label securitization channel (PLS) market, instead of the Government-Sponsored Entities (GSEs, or Fannie and Freddie). The fly-by-night ...

Last night, President Obama laid out his vision “to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.” At first blush, talking about a thriving middle class may seem like an old, hackneyed idea. We often hear politicians talk about how they believe that everyone who works hard and plays ...

At this point everyone knows about Fix the Debt. It is a collection of corporate CEOs put together by Peter Peterson, the Wall Street private equity mogul. Ostensibly they want to reduce budget deficits and the national debt, but for some reason their attention always seems focused on cutting Social Security and Medicare. While some ...

February 5 marks the 20th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The the law guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave for eligible workers in case of their own serious health problem, to care for a seriously ill family ...

If the Supreme Court strikes Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, what next? It’s a depressing question, with a depressing answer. That’s because no practical substitute solves the problem that Section 5 solves. Section 5 is special medicine for broken democracies. It demands that the federal government sign off on election changes, in areas ...

As I tell my law students, Loving v. Virginia is my all-time favorite Supreme Court case. This is so for very selfish reasons. Without Loving, my parents could not have been married in the Commonwealth where I grew up. Loving is the 1967 case in which the Supreme Court struck not just Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, ...

Reading POLITICO’s recent coverage of the budget debate, you’d think that nearly all liberals support Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts. In reality, liberal groups that support benefit cuts, such as the chained Consumer Price Index, are in the minority. In “The quiet liberal plans for entitlement reform,” POLITICO reporter David Nather highlights several changes to social ...

Jacob J Lew, the president’s nominee for Treasury secretary, and Mary Jo White, the nominee for chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, are making financial reformers nervous. The issue is not so much their track record, because neither has worked directly on financial-sector policy issues; it is much more about whom they know. Specifically, ...