“The share of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 with a job hasn’t even recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, which were, in turn, far below the peaks reached in the late 1990s,” Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog. “And, most importantly, no durable and significant acceleration of wage growth to healthy levels has happened yet.”
NPR
March 16, 2017
The proposal “is a redistribution away from older, lower-income people to younger, higher-income people,” said Josh Bevins, research director for the Economic Policy Institute, a bi-partisan Washington, DC think tank that focuses on low- and middle-income workers.
Quartz
March 16, 2017
Those are findings from a new report released by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute that says the “evidence is overwhelming that the unjustified incarceration of African American fathers (and, increasingly, mothers as well) is an important cause of the lowered performance of their children” and of the racial achievement gap.
The Washington Post
March 16, 2017
A new report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) puts forward another theory. Josh Bivens, the director of research at the EPI and the author of the paper, argues that the shortfall in spending (or demand) by households, governments, and businesses has held back the kinds of big-idea investments by American companies that drive increased productivity. These investments can include a company improving its workforce, such as by implementing training programs that help employees become more productive or hiring more experienced workers; investing in equipment so workers can do their jobs better; or researching technological advancements.
The Atlantic
March 15, 2017
Farms and restaurants rely on a substantial number of the estimated eight million unauthorized immigrants working in the United States. The Pew Research Center estimates 12 percent of restaurant workers are undocumented. The Economic Policy Institute puts the figure closer to 16 percent.
The New York Times
March 15, 2017
In many cases, your parents may be better off keeping any extra money in their own wallets. Families headed by a person ages 56 to 61 had a median amount of $17,000 saved for retirement in 2013, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Survey of Consumer Finances data. In contrast, the average American age 65 and older — generally, those over retirement age — spent $44,664 a year in 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says.
Associated Press
March 15, 2017
But a 298 percent pay increase for the same job — Kentucky track and field coach — is startling when compared with what happened in the rest of the economy between 2006 and 2016, a time span that includes a deep recession. Median pay for the average American worker increased 0.7 percent, and even workers in the 95th percentile — those making more than 95 percent of the rest of America — saw pay rise just 13 percent, according to Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “You have to recognize that everything crashed in 2008,” said Gould, referring to the financial crisis that year.
The Washington Post
March 14, 2017
Wage inequality didn’t worsen last year, but it still remains a persistent trend, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. “Overall, it is really just a story of the growing economy finally meaning that there has been more broad-based wage growth,” said Elise Gould, the senior EPI economist who authored the report. “This means there has been wage growth across the wage distribution, not only at the very top, which has characterized much of the last decade or so.” The report, “The State of American Wages 2016,” by the left-leaning Washington, D.C., think-tank, found that wage growth was more evenly distributed among all workers last year than it had been between 2000 and 2016. During that 16-year-period, wage growth was “consistently stronger” for high-wage workers than it was for middle- and lower-wage workers, causing the trend of rising wage inequality to persist.
The Plain Dealer
March 14, 2017
While a President who campaigned on a “drain-the-swamp” mentality that casts everyone in Washington as complicit in making the United States not great might sneer at worries of those kinds of economic hits, they’re enough to trigger a region-wide recession, says Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “Reducing the federal workforce by one-fifth, it would be devastating,” Bivens says. “A huge share of the good jobs in the DC area are federal employees. It makes you wonder how the business of government gets done.”
Washingtonian Magazine
March 14, 2017
There’s also upbeat news on wages. In a new report, economist Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that median wages, adjusted for inflation, grew 3.1 percent between 2015 and 2016 — a feat that, if repeated for a decade, would mean an increase of a third. (The median wage is the one exactly in the middle of all wages.) “What stands out in this last year of data is that the economic recovery appears to finally be reaching a broad swath of American workers,” writes Gould. “In fact, wage growth in 2016 was more rapid for middle- and low-wage workers than for those at the top.” The unemployment rate, 4.7 percent in February, is close to what many economists think is “full employment.”
The Washington Post
March 13, 2017