David Neumark

About

David Neumark is distinguished professor of economics and codirector of the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy at the University of California–Irvine. He has previously held positions at the Federal Reserve Board, the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, and the Public Policy Institute of California.

He has made research contributions in numerous areas of labor economics that intersect with important public policy issues. Neumark’s research on labor market discrimination has opened up new methods of measuring discrimination. His early work on wage equation decompositions led to efforts to better tie these measurement methods to underlying models of discrimination. Later work developed methods of using matched employer-employee data to test for discrimination. And his recent methodological contribution on audit and correspondence studies is being rapidly adopted in new and ongoing studies. 

Neumark was one of the original contributors to the “new minimum wage research,” helping to pioneer the use of state-level minimum wage variation to estimate minimum wage effects. His subsequent work moved well beyond the debate over employment effects, toward research on the effects of minimum wages on the income distribution, the long-run effects of minimum wages on human capital and earnings, and complementarities between minimum wages and the Earned Income Tax Credit. In related work, he was the first to assemble data and explore methods to study the effects of cities’ living wage laws, as well as contributing to understanding of the political economy of these laws. 

Neumark has authored many studies on age discrimination and the economics of aging. Recently he has studied how stronger age discrimination laws complement policy reforms intended to increase the labor supply of older workers, conducted a large-scale field experiment testing for age discrimination, and developed methods to test for age stereotypes in job ads and explore how these influence job searches of older workers.