The Center for Economics and Public Policy - CEPP

12/08/2014

A new study finds that the Clean Air Vehicle Stickers policy in California, which allows low-emissions hybrid cars in carpool lanes, creates greater welfare costs than environmental benefits. Existing carpoolers are penalized by greater traffic congestion and time costs.

http://www.cepp.uci.edu/CEPP%2011-17-14%20CAVS_PressRelease_Final.pdf

12/04/2014

CEPP Director and UCI economist David Neumark discusses the impact of minimum wages in an interview posted on the World Bank Jobs and Development blog.

In recent years, the minimum wage has become an increasingly popular policy instrument to reduce inequality in many emerging markets (like China, Hong Kong, and Cambodia), with others (like Singapore) weighing whether to adopt one. But a lot of confusion still surrounds the impact of minimum wages i…

12/02/2014

Do film incentives work? A recent study finds that while film incentives attract filmmakers, they do not create in-state jobs or businesses in the film industry.

http://www.cepp.uci.edu/files/docs/2014/CEPP%2011-20-14%20FilmIncentive_PressRelease.pdf

05/16/2014

High-tech companies' support for a bill that would increase visas for skilled foreign workers has sparked fear among comprehensive reform activists that the powerful industry wants to cut its own deal and abandon the larger cause of a comprehensive overhaul.

"Until a coalition like this has a tangible success, there are going to be inherent suspicions among the partners," said CEPP affiliate Louis DeSipio, a political science and Chicano/Latino studies professor at the University of California-Irvine. "The inaction of the House on immigration reform is creating tension. Each of the coalition partners is unsure of how committed the other partners are."

Some say the tech industry wants to cut a separate deal and abandon a comprehensive bill.

05/13/2014

The is tapping into Democratic-style identity politics to try to find a way to stop, or even reverse, its eroding support among minority voters.

CEPP affiliate Louis DeSipio, a professor of Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine, says Nixon wouldn’t recognize his former stomping grounds, referring to Orange County, California. “The white electorate on which [Republicans] have relied for many years is growing much more slowly than the non-white electorate.”

Kwang Song has never voted in the United States, but that could change after the 71-year-old bumped into Michelle Steel, a Republican candidate for the Orange County Board of Supervisors, outside the Hannam Chain Korean market in northern Orange County this month.

05/12/2014

Research by CEPP Director David Neumark was featured on 90.9 WBUR this past week in a discussion of current research on the ’s impact on jobs and the wage gap.

“We know very well, and nobody disagrees, that minimum wages do not target poor families well,” says Neumark, who goes on to explain that there’s a much better device for tackling poverty: the Earned Income Tax Credit, or . The credit is a direct payout to low-income families who work. “It encourages work,” he said of the EITC, and “it targets those benefits to poor families. You can’t get anything from the EITC if you’re a high-income family.”

Who would be helped by a higher minimum wage in Massachusetts? And is it the best way to tackle poverty?

04/10/2014

Older American workers got no help from stronger state laws against during and after the Great , and these laws could have made things tougher for them, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study by CEPP Director David Neumark and UCI Ph.D. candidate Patrick Button.

Research by David Neumark, economics Chancellor's Professor and Center for Economics & Public Policy director, and Patrick Button, economics graduate student, is featured by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco April 7, 2014

03/23/2014

The does a little more to help the poor than it used to.

A new study on the redistributive efficiency of the minimum wage reveals that recent labor market changes make the minimum wage slightly more effective.

02/26/2014

Do state hiring credits work?

According to economists David Neumark and Diego Grijalva, hiring credits that broadly target the unemployed and that allow states to recover credits if job growth did not take place help states boost job growth.

In response to job losses associated with the Great Recession, a number of states adopted hiring credits to encourage employers to create jobs. These credits provide tax breaks to employers that create jobs or expand payrolls, with the aim of increasing hiring by reducing labor costs. The evidence o...

02/21/2014

Economist David Neumark says the report focuses the discussion back where it should be – on the tradeoffs between the increases in and the loss of . “There is some job loss, so lets think about that cost relative to the benefits.”

The Congressional Budget Office that claims that raising the minimum wage could lift 900,000 families out of poverty, while eliminating half-a-million jobs.

02/15/2014

STRONG BUSINESS CLIMATES MAY ALSO INDICATE MORE INEQUALITY

For decades, states have tried to attract businesses by touting their positive “business climate,” which typically means low tax rates. But a new 2014 study at the University of California, Irvine’s Center for Economics & Public Policy (CEPP) shows that, although often associated with faster economic growth, lower state taxes are also associated with larger increases in income inequality.

http://www.economicsandpublicpolicy.uci.edu/files/economicsandpublicpolicy/docs/working_papers/neumark-muz_business_climate_dec._13_full.pdf

12/19/2013

Proponents of raising the point to the decline in it’s real value since the 1970s. But according to CEPP Director David Neumark, they fail to take into account a concurrent policy shift towards using the earned-income tax credit to ensure families with low-wage workers have minimally acceptable incomes.

Comparisons of the real value of today’s minimum wage with what prevailed decades ago fail to account for the rise of the earned-income tax credit as a primary vehicle for helping low-income families, an economist writes.