Thursday, November 4, 2021
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. (ET)
A live streamed event. Advance registration required.
Earlier this year, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 was introduced to raise the federal minimum wage, in annual increments, to $15 per hour by June 2025. However, experts have disagreed on if and how an increase of this magnitude should be put into place. This event will include a discussion with two experts with differing views on this subject who shared their views in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management’s recent Point/Counterpoint column: Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute and Michael Reich of the University of California at Berkley. Please join a live conversation with these authors, hosted by American University’s School of Public Affairs, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and Mathematica. Opening and closing remarks provided by Erdal Tekin, Professor, School of Public Affairs; Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. This discussion will be moderated by Paul Decker, President and CEO of Mathematica; Associate Editor, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Opening remarks by AU School of Public Affairs Dean, Vicky M. Wilkins
Speaker Bios:
Erdal Tekin is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. He is an applied microeconomist with broad research interests, including questions related to the economics of child care as well as the economics of crime and health economics. His research has been published in numerous journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Health Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of Law and Economics. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001.
Michael Reich is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) of the University of California at Berkeley. He served as Director of IRLE from 2004 to 2015. Reich received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. His research publications cover numerous areas of labor economics and political economy, including the economics of racial inequality, the analysis of labor market segmentation, historical stages in U.S. labor markets and social structures of accumulation, high performance workplaces, union-management cooperation, Japanese labor-management systems, living wages and minimum wages.
Michael R. Strain is Director of Economic Policy Studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of the recently published book, “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It),” which examines longer-term economic outcomes for workers and households. An economist, his research has been published in academic journals and in policy journals, and he has edited two books on economics and public policy. Dr. Strain also writes frequently for popular audiences. His essays and op-eds have been published by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others. He is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is frequently interviewed by major media outlets, speaks often to a variety of audiences, and has testified before Congress. Before joining AEI, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell.
This event is moderated by Paul Decker who is the president and CEO of Mathematica and a nationally recognized expert in policy research, data analytics, education, and labor policy. For over three decades, he has been working to improve public well-being through the use of evidence. Since becoming president and CEO in 2007, Decker has led the expansion and diversification of Mathematica’s work into new and evolving areas while maintaining its long-standing commitment to rigorous and objective analysis. Decker is also the Associate Editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management, a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development, and chairs the Government Relations Committee of CEO Connection.
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