Arindrajit Dube

Last updated
Arin Dube
Academic background
Alma mater Stanford University (BA, MA)
University of Chicago (PhD)

Arindrajit (Arin) Dube is Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known internationally for his empirical research on the effects of minimum wage policies. [1] [2] He is among the foremost scholars regarding the economic impact of minimum wages. [3] In 2019, he was asked by the UK Treasury to conduct a review of the evidence on the impact of minimum wages, which informed the decision to set the level of the National Living Wage. [4] [5] His work is focused on the economics of the labor market, the role of imperfect competition, institutions, norms, and behavioral factors that affect wage setting, jobs, and inequality.

Contents

Biography

Dube graduated from Roosevelt High School in Seattle in 1991. He received his BA in economics (with honors) and MA in international development policy from Stanford University in 1996. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2003, and was a postdoctorate scholar at UC Berkeley prior to joining University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the brother of economist Oeindrila Dube. [6]

Research

Dube has published dozens of works in labor economics, health economics, public finance, and political economy. He is one of the leading scholars of minimum wage effects on employment [7] and inequality. [8] In 2024, he co-authored (with Attila Lindner) a comprehensive review of the minimum wage literature for The Handbook of Labor Economics. [9] Dube has also studied the role of fairness concerns in wage-setting, [10] the nature and extent of competition in labor markets, [11] [12] [13] the role of firm wage policies in explaining inequality growth, impact of unions in the labor market, and post-pandemic changes in wage inequality. [14] He has testified on the Minimum Wage before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, [15] and written about this subject in the New York Times. [16] He has studied employment patterns in all border counties in the U.S. that were affected by state-level minimum wages on one side of state border but not the other side. [3] Dube's other research includes the impact of outsourcing in service occupations on wages and inequality. [17] His research on imperfect competition (monopsony) in the labor market includes experimental evidence from online labor markets, [18] measuring quit elasticities using event studies in matched employer-employee data, [19] as well as how wages can bunch at round numbers in monopsonistic markets. [20] He has also written on how the 2004 expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in the United States led to a surge in violence in Mexico, [21] and how top-secret coup authorizations by the CIA were capitalized into asset prices of highly exposed American corporations. [22]

Selected works

References

  1. "UK Treasury's pick of minimum wage advocate is a signal, say economists". Financial Times. Retrieved 2019-07-26.
  2. "The Ins & Outs Of The Minimum Wage". NPR.org. Retrieved 2019-07-26.
  3. 1 2 "The Burger Flipper Who Became a World Expert on the Minimum Wage". Bloomberg.com. 2021-02-03. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  4. "Impacts of minimum wages: review of the international evidence". GOV.UK. Retrieved 2021-02-14.
  5. "Independent review backs Chancellor pledge for higher National Living Wage". GOV.UK. Retrieved 2021-02-14.
  6. Dube, Arindrajit (2019-01-30). "My brilliant sister Oeindrila Dube (at @HarrisSchool) has a totally fascinating paper that finds Queens in Europe were more likely to engage in wars than kings, perhaps counterintuively". @arindube. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  7. Zipperer, Ben; Lindner, Attila; Dube, Arindrajit; Cengiz, Doruk (2019). "The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 134 (3): 1405–1454. doi: 10.1093/qje/qjz014 . ISSN   0033-5533.
  8. Dube, Arindrajit (2019). "Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes". American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 11 (4): 268–304. doi: 10.1257/app.20170085 . hdl: 10419/161195 . ISSN   1945-7782.
  9. Dube, Arindrajit; Lindner, Attila (2024-01-01), Dustmann, Christian; Lemieux, Thomas (eds.), "Chapter 4 - Minimum wages in the 21st century", Handbook of Labor Economics, vol. 5, Elsevier, pp. 261–383, retrieved 2025-09-22
  10. Dube, Arindrajit; Giuliano, Laura; Leonard, Jonathan (February 2019). "Fairness and Frictions: The Impact of Unequal Raises on Quit Behavior". American Economic Review. 109 (2): 620–663. doi:10.1257/aer.20160232. ISSN   0002-8282.
  11. Dube, Arindrajit; Manning, Alan; Naidu, Suresh (August 2025). "Monopsony and Employer Misoptimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers". American Economic Review. 115 (8): 2689–2721. doi:10.1257/aer.20200678. ISSN   0002-8282.
  12. Dube, Arindrajit; Jacobs, Jeff; Naidu, Suresh; Suri, Siddharth (March 2020). "Monopsony in Online Labor Markets". American Economic Review: Insights. 2 (1): 33–46. doi:10.1257/aeri.20180150. ISSN   2640-205X.
  13. Bassier, Ihsaan; Dube, Arindrajit; Naidu, Suresh (2022-04-01). "Monopsony in Movers: The Elasticity of Labor Supply to Firm Wage Policies". Journal of Human Resources. 57 (S): S50 –s86. doi:10.3368/jhr.monopsony.0319-10111R1. ISSN   0022-166X.
  14. Autor, David; Dube, Arindrajit; McGrew, Annie (March 2023), The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market (Working Paper), Working Paper Series, National Bureau of Economic Research, doi:10.3386/w31010, 31010, retrieved 2025-09-22
  15. https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Dube.pdf Statement by Arindrajit Dube, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Economics University of Massachusetts, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Hearing on “Keeping up with a Changing Economy: Indexing the Minimum Wage”
  16. Dube, Arindrajit (2013-11-30). "The Minimum We Can Do". Opinionator. Retrieved 2019-07-26.
  17. Dube, Arindrajit; Kaplan, Ethan (2010). "Does Outsourcing Reduce Wages in the Low-Wage Service Occupations? Evidence from Janitors and Guards". ILR Review. 63 (2): 287–306. doi:10.1177/001979391006300206. ISSN   0019-7939. S2CID   37302026.
  18. Suri, Siddharth; Naidu, Suresh; Jacobs, Jeff; Dube, Arindrajit. "Monopsony in Online Labor Markets". American Economic Review: Insights. doi:10.1257/aeri. S2CID   241328479.
  19. Bassier, Ihsaan; Dube, Arindrajit; Naidu, Suresh (2022-04-01). "Monopsony in Movers: The Elasticity of Labor Supply to Firm Wage Policies". Journal of Human Resources. 57 (S): S50 –s86. doi:10.3368/jhr.monopsony.0319-10111R1. ISSN   0022-166X.
  20. Dube, Arindrajit; Manning, Alan; Naidu, Suresh (August 2025). "Monopsony and Employer Misoptimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers". American Economic Review. 115 (8): 2689–2721. doi:10.1257/aer.20200678. ISSN   0002-8282.
  21. García-Ponce, Omar; Dube, Oeindrila; Dube, Arindrajit (2013). "Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico". American Political Science Review. 107 (3): 397–417. doi:10.1017/S0003055413000178. hdl: 10419/69479 . ISSN   0003-0554. S2CID   9252246.
  22. Naidu, Suresh; Kaplan, Ethan; Dube, Arindrajit (2011). "Coups, Corporations, and Classified Information". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 126 (3): 1375–1409. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.700.4106 . doi:10.1093/qje/qjr030. ISSN   0033-5533.