Minimum Wages & Monopsony Power Conference 2025

Steven Raphael is the Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE). He is a Professor of Public Policy and holds the James D. Marver Chair at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His research focuses on the economics of low-wage labor markets, housing, and the economics of crime and corrections.  

His research over the past decade has focused on evaluating criminal justice reform and studying race disparities in criminal justice involvement. Current projects focus on race disparities in police stop outcomes and arrest, the effect of gun control policy on homicide, and research involving various efforts to reduce pretrial detention. Most of his prior work in this area focused on the employment and reentry problems faced by the formerly incarcerated and understanding growth in the U.S. prison population.

Emmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics and Director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California Berkeley. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1999. His research focuses on inequality and tax policy. Jointly with Thomas Piketty, he created the top income share series that show a dramatic increase in US inequality since 1980. The data have been widely discussed in the public debate. His 2019 book The Triumph of Injustice, joint with his colleague Gabriel Zucman, narrates the demise of US progressive taxation and how to reinvent it in the 21st century. He received numerous academic awards including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2010, and a Honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.

Enrique Lopezlira is the director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is a labor economist, directing and conducting research on how policies affect working families, with a particular focus on how these policies impact racial and gender equity. Dr. Lopezlira previously served as senior policy advisor for economic and employment policy at UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), one of the largest Latinx civil rights organizations in the nation. He also served as deputy director for policy and research at Western Progress, a think tank advancing progressive policies and change in the eight states of the Rocky Mountain West.

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Ellora Derenoncourt is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a member of the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Economics. She is also the founder and faculty director for the Program for Research on Inequality at Princeton Economics. She works on labor economics, economic history, and the study of inequality. Recently she has studied the northern backlash against the Great Migration, the role of minimum wages in racial earnings inequality, and the long-run evolution of the racial wealth gap. Her ongoing work studies the effect of labor market institutions on low wage sectors and the impact of criminal justice policy on labor market inequality.

Her work has been featured in the Economist, the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. She received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2019. 

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Justin Wiltshire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and an affiliate of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics in the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley.

His research has been covered in outlets including The Atlantic, New York Magazine, CNN Business, USA TODAY, NBER Digest, and Brookings, and has been referenced in testimony before the U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Committee, the U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, and various state-level Labor Committees.

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Denis is a PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of California, Davis. In August 2025, he will start a Postdoc position at the IRLE at UC Berkeley. His primary research fields are Labor Economics and Public Economics, with a focus on the labor market effects of wage floor policies. 

Todd Sorensen is an Associate Teaching Professor at UC Merced and a fellow at IZA and GLO. He joined UCM in 2022 as a Visiting Associate Professor and was an Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) from 2014 to 2023. 

Before moving to UNR, Todd started his career with seven years as an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside. Todd has taught courses at the introductory, intermediate, advanced undergraduate, and graduate level. He enjoys teaching labor and econometrics the most. Todd’s research on imperfect competition in labor markets has been published in ILR Review, Labour Economics, and the Journal of Population Economics. His work was recently cited in the Economic Report of the President.

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Sydnee Caldwell is an assistant professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at the Haas School of Business and an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. Caldwell’s research focuses on topics in labor and personnel economics.

Caldwell received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 and a BA in applied mathematics and economics from UC Berkeley in 2012. She is the 2019 winner of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research dissertation prize and was chosen as a participant in the 2019 Review of Economic Studies European Tour. Before joining UC Berkeley she was a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England.

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Arindrajit Dube is the Provost Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work focuses on labor economics, along with health economics, public finance, and political economy. His current areas of research include wage inequality; the importance of labor market competition; minimum wage effects on employment and inequality; the role of fairness concerns in the workplace; the interplay of behavioral biases and labor market power; the impact of unemployment benefits; and the role of firm wage policies in explaining the growth in inequality.

He has also conducted research on employer health mandates; unions and collective bargaining; outsourcing and subcontracting; gun laws and violence; and the capitalization of private information in stock prices.

Dube received his B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Development Policy from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has previously held visiting faculty positions at the MIT Department of Economics and Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

Suresh Naidu is an Associate Professor in Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He previously served as a Harvard Academy Junior Scholar at Harvard University and as an Instructor in Economics and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Naidu holds a BMath from the University of Waterloo, a master’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

His primary research areas include economic effects of political transitions, economic history of slavery and labor institutions, international migration, and economic applications of natural language processing.

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David Card is the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley he taught at University of Chicago in 1982-83 and Princeton University from 1983 to 1996. He has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Harvard University, UCLA, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. From 2012 to 2017 he was Director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Card’s research interests include wage determination, education, inequality, immigration, and gender-related issues. He co-authored the 1995 book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, co-edited eight additional titles, and has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters. In 1995, he received the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark Prize, which is awarded to the economist under 40 whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. He was President of the AEA in 2021 and co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021.

Chris Lowenstein is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also affiliated with the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. 

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Krista Ruffini is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an Affiliate at CES-Ifo.  Her research examines how  government policies affect labor market, education, and health outcomes, with a focus on programs targeted to disadvantaged populations. One area of this work examines how workplace policies, such as minimum wages, affect direct care employees, employers, and patients in the long-term care industry. Krista received her PhD and MA from UC Berkeley. 

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William H. Dow is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the School of Public Health and the Department of Demography. He directs UC Berkeley’s Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging, and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dow has previously served as Interim Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. Honors include the Kenneth J. Arrow Award given by the International Health Economics Association. He received his PhD in economics from Yale University.

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Alexandra Hill is an Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers around the US agricultural workforce and seeks to demonstrate how a variety of factors impact worker well-being and how these factors then impact businesses.

Hilary Hoynes is the Chancellor’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley where she directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab and co-directs the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. She is an economist who works on poverty, inequality, and the social safety net. Her current research examines how access to the social safety net in early life affects children’s later life health and human capital outcomes.

Professor Hoynes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Art and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on National Statistics and serves on the board of MDRC and the California Budget and Policy Center.

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James Parrott is Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. He is a labor economist and budget policy expert who has focused on labor standards, pay equity, social insurance programs, the effects of higher minimum wages, and equitable tax policies. Parrott’s analyses of the pay for New York City nonprofit human services workers has supported actions to achieve pay equity for this largely women of color workforce providing essential public services under City government contract. In previous positions he worked for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the City and State of New York, and the independent Fiscal Policy Institute. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His recent reports can be found at: http://www.centernyc.org/reports

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Dmitri Koustas is an Assistant Professor at The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. He specializes in labor economics, public economics, and macroeconomics, with research areas in household finance and the “future of work.” 

Laura Giuliano is Professor of Economics at the University of California–Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on topics in labor and personnel economics and the economics of education. It includes work on the effects of minimum wages on employment and the role of fairness concerns in the workplace.

Before joining UC Santa Cruz, Giuliano held faculty positions at the University of Miami and UC Merced and visiting positions at UC Berkeley and the University of Virginia. In 2015–16, she served as senior economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers where her portfolio included minimum wages and labor market competition. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Giuliano received her PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley.

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Michael Reich is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED) 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.

More from Michael:

• Listen to a recent interview Michael on the Work Goes On podcast (transcript)

• Read an interview with Michael in the Berkeley Economic Review • Read “How the 1963 March on Washington Changed the U.S.– and me,”  an article Michael wrote for The American Prospect