Pop quiz: What is the most expensive place to live in Minnesota? If you said the Twin Cities metro area, you would be … wrong.
It’s the Rochester metro area.
At least, that is the surprising conclusion from the numbers crunched by the Family Budget Calculator, annually published by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank that looks at rising inequality in the country.
Post Bulletin (Minnesota)
March 16, 2026
As the new rules are taking effect, they are expected to cost H-2A workers around $2 billion in pay cuts, while putting $3 billion of downward wage pressure on U.S. farm employees, analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reports.
The Mirror US
March 16, 2026
Economic Policy Institute reports that black women, start of 2025, we were at a 5.4% unemployment rate, but we ended the year at 7.5, and we see that number continuing to rise.
PBS North Carolina
March 16, 2026
Nina Mast, a policy and economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, spoke in favor of the bill during a Feb. 26 hearing before the Colorado House Committee on Business Affairs and Labor.
“In the past year, OSHA has faced unprecedented threats to its enforcement capabilities, and aggressive immigration enforcement will make workers even less likely to feel safe reporting unsafe conditions at work,” Mast said. “Because of these threats, state lawmakers have an opportunity and responsibility to resist the erosion of hard-won worker protections and take up the mantle of advancing workers’ right to a safe workplace.
“The sponsors of this bill have shown that they take this commitment seriously, and we urge all members of this committee and the Colorado General Assembly to do the same by supporting the passage of H.B. 1054.”
Safety and Health Magazine
March 16, 2026
“Nobody would say, ‘Draw [your savings] down to zero,’” said Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “But if you have a few hundred thousand dollars, you can live on that until 70.”
USA Today
March 16, 2026
Even so, some analysts say the proposed wage may still fall short of what it takes to live comfortably in the city. Data from the Economic Policy Institute estimates a single adult in the New York City metro area would need to earn about $83,262 annually or roughly $40.03 an hour to cover basic expenses comfortably (7).
MoneyWise
March 16, 2026
No one has been harder hit by the current flailing economy than Black women, who have faced higher job losses than any other demographic group, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
ABC7 New York
March 16, 2026
At the start of this year, minimum wage hikes took effect in 19 states, affecting more than 8.3 million workers and adding an estimated $5 billion in wages nationwide, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Benzinga (via Yahoo! Finance)
March 16, 2026
As the president’s immigration policies squeeze an already tight supply of farm labor, the Trump administration is making it cheaper to hire foreign farmworkers…
The predicament Maria and her son face underline a point made by economists: Lowering wages for H-2A workers will not lead to more American workers in agriculture or increased pay for native workers.
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, estimated that the methodological changes would result in a $2 billion cut to the annual wages of guest farmworkers — and a $3 billion cut for U.S.-based farmworkers.
New York Times
March 16, 2026
Gothamist also drew attention to some other scholarship on the subject, namely a compilation of 88 studies by the nonpartisan think tank Economic Policy Institute, that points to a rather different conclusion than Grech and Heritage.
“Older research found more sizable disemployment effects. But with improvements in research methodology over time, the conclusions of studies have shifted dramatically in the last 15 years,” the EPI report notes. “The median employment response to wage increases for studies published since 2010 is very close to zero,” meaning few businesses resorted to layoffs to accommodate the pay hike, according to the study.
The Westside Spirit
March 16, 2026