The research of Arindrajit Dube is referenced in a story about whether London should adopt its own minimum wage. Dube gave a talk at the Resolution Foundation recently where he discussed his work on how localities in the U.S. set the minimum wage based on local conditions. Dube also contends that raising the minimum wage has a small impact on employment and encourages workers to stay in their jobs.
(The Guardian, 3/26/15)
Arindrajit Dube, associate professor of economics, has been studying low-wage work, including the topic of minimum wage, for more than a decade. President Obama has cited Dube’s research as he pushes to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour and Dube’s work was in the forefront in November when voters in four states approved measures to raise the minimum wage.
There’s a lot of heated public debate over the effect on the economy of raising the minimum wage. Some say it will lead to rampant job loss, others say it will help end income inequality. Do economists have the answer? Read more……
Klara Zwickl, a postdoctoral researcher at the Political Economy Research Institute, is interviewed about a recent report she co-authored with economists Michael Ash and James K. Boyce, both of PERI, on environmental inequality. The study shows that poor people and racial minorities are disproportionately affected by pollution exposure.
The Real News (3-19-15)
Ash says it “offers resilience in the face of economic change. An extreme case of economic monoculture is Detroit, which has suffered severely because of the decline of its all-eggs-in-one-basket automobile industry. A diverse economy permits less painful adjustment and creates greater possibility that the next big thing is already present.” (Triple Pundit, 3/18/15)
From an article in the Killeen Herald by Clay Thorp, staff writer (3/10/15):
Many Texas cities use tax abatements to attract large companies. But economists such as Michael Ash, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, said many large cities should avoid large tax breaks to attract the biggest companies.
“Local leadership should avoid the subsidy trap, offering enormous tax breaks to try to attract a big employer,” Ash said.
“It’s almost irresistible because other cities are also bidding for the same companies, but it is often a race to the bottom. It would be good to have state or even federal leadership in preventing these bidding wars.”
Press Release: Expert Global Commission Responds to One-Sided Tax Debate
(New York) Responding to widespread anger about corporate tax avoidance, the impacts of such avoidance on inequality and poverty, and concerns that current tax reform processes are inadequate, a new nonpartisan body—the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT)—has been established to propose reforms from the perspective of the public interest. The inaugural meeting of the Commission will take place in New York on March 18-19, 2015.
The Commission’s Chair, former UN Under-Secretary-General José Antonio Ocampo, says: “The world has changed but the international tax system has not. Corporations play governments against each other, for example, in encouraging race-to-the-bottom tax incentives, and the public loses out. There are billions of dollars at stake. This Commission will shed light on where the rules of the game, and the institutions that govern them, need to change.” Read more…..
“A diverse economy permits less painful adjustment and creates greater possibility that the next big thing is already present,” Ash says. (Orlando Sentinel, 3/10/15)
A single-payer or universal health plan would save New Yorkers $45 billion a year in health-care expenditures, according to a study released Tuesday by a University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor.
If such a taxpayer-supported health plan were enacted, 98 percent of New York households would pay less than they do now and 200,000 jobs would be created due to the savings accrued by business, according to Gerald Friedman, chair of the Economics Department at UMass Amherst. (From Times Union, Albany, 3-10-15, Claire Hughes)
Read more: Times Union [Albany], Buffalo Business First