Christian E. Weller is a senior fellow at American Progress and a professor of public policy at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His area of expertise includes retirement income security, macroeconomics, money and banking, and international finance. He is also a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute and an institute fellow at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Gerontology Institute. Prior to joining the Center, he was on the research staff at the Economic Policy Institute, where he remains a research associate.
Christian has also worked at the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn in Germany; under the Department of Public Policy of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.; and served in the banking sector in Germany, Belgium, and Poland. He is a respected academic with more than 100 academic and popular publications. His academic publications have appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Development Studies, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Aging and Social Policy, and the Journal of Economic Issues, among others. His popular writings have been published in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
He co-authored with E. Wolff the book, Retirement Income: The Crucial Role of Social Security and was a co-editor of Employee Pensions: Policies, Problems and Possibilities with T. Ghilarducci. In 2006, he was awarded the Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. In 2007, Christian was elected to the board of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, one of the country’s largest associations for professionals in the fields of labor and employment relations.
His work is frequently cited in the press and he is often a guest on national TV and radio programs. Christian holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Union membership not only increases wealth for working-class families but also narrows racial wealth gaps and offers a path to the middle class.
New CAP analysis highlights how the nation’s failed experiment with mass incarceration and overcriminalization strips wealth from families and widens the racial wealth gap.
Policymakers must prioritize improving housing access and affordability for low-income households through immediate and long-term investments.
If the U.S. Federal Reserve acts too aggressively, it could risk a recession and threaten the economy’s strength and the labor market’s momentum.
President Biden’s signature legislation, the American Rescue Plan Act, accelerated the economic recovery when it lost momentum; further fiscal steps are necessary to maintain this momentum and reduce economic inequality.
Expanded child tax credit payments have provided much-needed financial support to a wide range of families across income level, race/ethnicity, and education.
The Build Back Better Act and the already enacted bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will help reduce inflationary pressures in the coming years and lower costs on essentials such as prescription drugs, energy, child care, and housing.
Unions help narrow the gap between working families and the superrich.
Union membership significantly increases wealth for all households, but Black and Hispanic families gain the most.
A temporary bump in inflation limited to a few items obscures the fact that policies such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) and the $3.5 trillion budget resolution would boost incomes for Americans.
The Biden administration has started to implement policies to make it easier for Black households to build wealth at the same rate as white households; additional steps are both possible and necessary.
The lack of wealth in many African-American households has left them especially vulnerable to the financial fallout from the coronavirus crisis; but the federal government has perhaps its best opportunity yet to fix these racial disparities.
