In this May 1, 2026, event at Columbia University, critically acclaimed minimum wage scholar, Arindrajit Dube, provost professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Germany, discussed his new book on pay setting in the United States, using two decades of research to show how wages have become stagnant for the majority of workers and the economic costs of that stagnation.
The discussion also included two Columbia professors:
- Suresh Naidu, Professor of International and Public Affairs and Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics
- Alex Hertel-Fernandez, Herbert Lehman Professor of International and Public Affairs, and founder of the American Democracy Initiative at SIPA's Institute of Global Politics
Talmon Smith, economics reporter at The New York Times, moderated the event, which was cosponsored by the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects and SIPA's Institute of Global Politics' American Democracy Initiative.
