Why do we care about emergency savings?

When we talk about economic wellbeing, the conversation often gravitates toward familiar indicators: poverty rates, food insecurity, housing cost burdens, or income growth. These are all important, but they tend to capture only one dimension of a household’s financial life. Lately, I’ve been thinking more about a different indicator—one that people intuitively understand and care deeply about, even if it doesn’t show up as often in policy debates: whether individuals have any emergency savings. 

One reason I find the focus on emergency savings so fascinating is that the metric is a function of both income and consumption. Most of our indicators of wellbeing focus solely on one side of that equation: poverty or food insecurity for example. Emergency savings as a metric for well being is a bit closer to something like the Supplemental Poverty Measure which takes into account differences in cost of living,

So, why do we care about whether or not people have some emergency savings at all? What does it tell us about people’s wellbeing that we don’t get from knowing their poverty status or whether or not a person is housing cost burdened?

One reason to care about emergency savings is research that ties emergency savings to financial stress. Households without any emergency savings report significantly higher levels of anxiety about their finances. When a car breaks down, a child gets sick, or hours at work are cut, families without savings have few options. They may turn to credit cards, payday loans, or simply fall behind on bills. This stress doesn’t even require an emergency to occur, instead the stress is the result of households knowing they wouldn’t be able to respond if something came up. 

Economists sometimes say that saving is just deferred consumption. This implies that saving money doesn’t provide excess value to people, but rather it is a tool for smoothing out our consumption over time. However, if having some amount of savings leads to its own tangible benefits, then that means it does provide its own unique benefit.

Another reason is that we know how bad situations can become if households are unable to pay for certain necessities because of an emergency. A car problem might force someone to choose between losing their job because they can’t get to work anymore or paying their rent in a given month. These events not only negatively impact the people who experience them, but they create additional strain on the social safety net.

Emergency savings offer a useful lens into how households manage uncertainty. They reflect whether families have even a small buffer to handle unexpected expenses without immediate disruption. When that cushion is missing, the result is often heightened stress and a greater risk that a single setback can cascade into larger problems. 

Looking at emergency savings alongside other measures of wellbeing helps us understand the financial challenges households face. Even a small amount of emergency savings can make the difference between a temporary challenge and a lasting hardship.

Immigration slowdown threatens Ohio’s future

For one reason or another, I have been writing and thinking a lot about population growth lately. An important contributor to population growth in Ohio over the past ten years has been international immigration, which also happens to be on my mind a lot these days.

According to American Community Survey responses, Ohio’s population grew by about 290,000 from 2014 to 2024, an increase of only about 2.5% over that time period. At the same time, Ohio’s foreign-born population grew by 170,000 from a baseline of 480,000, a 36% increase. This means that three out of every five people added to Ohio’s population over the last 10 years was born in another country.

This matters because new people in the state have an impact on the economy. These new residents are buying products in stores and are working in companies. The American Immigration Council estimates that foreign-born residents spend $20 billion in Ohio every year and fill hundreds of jobs, particularly in the transportation and warehousing; manufacturing; and professional, scientific, administrative, and waste services industries.

Foreign-born workers are key to Ohio’s medical, tech, and higher education industries, with more than 1 in 5 Ohio doctors, 1 in 5 Ohio software developers, and about 1 in 6 Ohio college instructors born outside the United States.

Foreign-born Ohio residents are also starting businesses. According to the American Immigration Council, 5.1% of Ohio residents were born in another country, but 8.2% of its entrepreneurs were. This matters because new and small businesses make up a disproportionate amount of job creation in the economy, meaning that foreign-born residents are driving job creation in the state.

Foreign-born residents also contribute to the tax base in Ohio. The council estimates immigrants contribute $2.5 billion in state and local taxes per year. That is enough to fund Ohio’s departments serving agriculture, children and youth, developmental disabilities, health, public safety, and transportation, and still have $100 million left over.

All this is not limited to documented immigrants. The council found Ohio’s 120,000 undocumented immigrants spend about $2.6 billion in the state every year and pay about $740 million in taxes every year.

And because they exist, all of this could be in trouble.

Due to aggressive deportation, enforcement policy, and rhetoric by policymakers at the federal level, net immigration into the United States dropped from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week. The report says this number will drop to about 300,000 in 2026 if current trends continue. The bureau estimated that the U.S. foreign-born population dropped by 1.5 million from January to June 2025. The bureau also said the country might see more people moving out of the United States than moving into it within the next few years.

Ohio is already set to lose population by mid-century. If Ohio has trends like the rest of the country, loss of immigrants will cause Ohio’s population to drop more quickly than previously expected among a segment of the population that is younger, more entrepreneurial, and more likely to fill jobs than the population as a whole.

So for those of you who want fewer workers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, inventors, doctors, educators, tech workers, and consumers, raise a glass and rejoice. You are getting just what you wanted.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

What is the Gini Coefficient?

Back in 2022, we released a study on inequality in Ohio and a few policy options that could impact it. This was one part of our series studying different ways to understand the economy, as well as reports on human development, poverty, subjective wellbeing, and the economic growth. 

We are currently working on updating the inequality study, and as part of that we are calculating the Gini Coefficient for Ohio. 

The Gini coefficient is a numerical measure of inequality, most commonly used to describe how evenly income or wealth is distributed within a population. It ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 represents perfect equality (everyone has the same amount of income) and 1 represents perfect inequality (one person has all income, and everyone else has no income). The Gini coefficient is a useful summary statistic to assess income inequality, though it can be a little esoteric and hard to understand by itself. That’s why today I wanted to explain what the Gini Coefficient is and why it’s so important to understand inequality. 

To understand the Gini Coefficient, we first need to take a detour and talk about the Lorenz Curve. The Lorenz Curve was introduced in 1905 by economist Max Lorenz as a way to represent income or wealth inequality graphically. The Lorenz Curve plots the cumulative income held by the bottom X% of a population. For example, we might be able to say the bottom 50% of the population cumulatively has 25% of the total income in some region. 

Below is an example of what a Lorenz Curve looks like in practice. The straight line shows what perfect equality would look like in theory, while the curved line shows the empirical Lorenz curve.

When a Lorenz curve is shown, it’s often plotted alongside a straight line that shows what perfect equality looks like. If this chart is difficult to understand, it may be easier to consider the straight line case first. In this case, if you have say the bottom 25%* of the population and add up all their income, then those people cumulatively have 25% of the total income of the whole population. The curved line represents the real data in some place. Above we see that the bottom 60% or so of the population has 25% of the total income. The closer the curved line is to straight, the more equal the income distribution is.

This curve is the basis for the Gini Coefficient, which was first developed by Corrado Gini in 1912. The Gini Coefficient is defined as the ratio of the area between the perfect equality curve and the Lorenz Curve divided by the total area under the perfect equality curve. In the image above that is equal to A / (A + B).

This term has many nice mathematical properties. It’s straightforward to calculate, it is bounded between 0 and 1, and it allows us to easily compare Lorenz curves from different populations. Without the Gini Coefficient, you’d have to stare at two charts and try to determine minute differences between curves. Instead, we can just look at this one metric and see whether one area has more or less income inequality than another.

The Gini Coefficient is not the only important factor when studying inequality, but it does provide a lot of information. As we progress with our updated inequality study for Ohio, we will dig deeper into what’s driving these patterns and how they’ve shifted over time. By pairing the Gini Coefficient with other measures and exploring the policies that shape economic outcomes, we hope to offer a clearer sense of what might actually move the needle on inequality in Ohio.

*In cases where people have the same income, their order can be determined randomly in order to calculate the cumulative income percentage. 

What would universal U.S. medical debt forgiveness cost?

In 2014, former debt collection executives founded an organization called RIP Medical Debt. The organization was built around a hairbrained scheme: what if a nonprofit raised money to buy debt from collections companies, then instantly forgave it?

The organization picked up steam quickly. Within a decade, RIP Medical Debt was partnering with major U.S. cities, getting donations from cities themselves to forgive millions of dollars worth of debt. Today, the organization, now called Undue Medical Debt, claimed $25 billion in forgiven medical debt, relieving debt for over 15 million people across the United States.

How does this work? The answer is cold, hard economics. The founders of RIP Medical Debt saw how many millions of dollars were owed by families that were not going to pay them back. They knew that it would be worth it for their company if someone came to them and said they would buy this medical debt back from them for a penny on the dollar because the chances were so low that they would be able to collect this debt. So that’s what they do: they offer debt companies pennies on the dollar for debt and are able to buy it then free people from billions of dollars of debt with those purchases.

Even if families are not going to pay medical debt back, debt has impacts on their lives. Medical debt can threaten family fiscal stability by creating mounting debts that families plan to pay off but have trouble doing. If families don’t pay on time, it can impact their credit scores, which then makes it harder to finance homes, transportation, or other needs. Medical debt can even threaten physical or mental health since debt can make people skip medical appointments in a hope of not accumulating more debt, leading to missed preventative screenings and prescription refills. 

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the Census Bureau’s Survey on Income and Program Participation, Americans owe upwards of $220 billion in medical debt. Let’s say the federal government wanted to pay all this debt off at once. It could pay it off dollar for dollar. This would be a considerable expense, but not impossible to finance. According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, repealing the tax cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for income over $400,000 per year would raise about $247 billion per year. This means a policy change like this could finance medical debt forgiveness at its most generous level to holders of debt in one year.

Let’s look at the other end of the extreme for the cost of medical debt forgiveness. If medical debt could be purchased and forgiven at a rate of one cent per dollar, the rate Undue Medical Debt claims they purchase debt at on average, then the cost would instead come out to $2.2 billion. This vastly expands the range of fiscal tools that could be used to finance debt medical forgiveness in the United States. More marginal fiscal changes like reducing compensation for military personnel ($6 billion per year), medical malpractice reform ($4 billion per year), or capping cost of living adjustments for the top 10% of social security beneficiaries ($5 billion per year) would finance universal national medical debt forgiveness if the federal government reimbursed collectors at this rate.

Let’s see what a more conservative approach would look like. Let’s say the federal government planned to forgive medical debt at 50 cents on the dollar and do it over a course of ten years. That means the federal government would need to finance this program with $110 billion of spending spread out over ten years. Some policy options to achieve this financing is to slow initial benefit growth for social security for the top 30% of earners ($160 billion over ten years), capping cost of living adjustments for the top 25% of social security beneficiaries ($180 billion over ten years), enacting a vehicle registration fee ($110 billion over ten years), limiting pell grants for high-earning and part-time students ($110 billion over ten years), increasing the corporate stock buyback rate to 4% ($110 billion over ten years), repealing targeted corporate tax breaks to companies fossil fuel and renewable energy production, low-income housing, life insurance, and credit union industries ($190 billion over ten years), and increasing cigarette and alcohol taxes ($190 billion over ten years). Other policy options that would come close would be making FY2025 foreign aid recissions permanent ($100 billion over ten years), cancelling the One Big Beautiful Bill Act farm subsidy expansions ($100 billion over ten years), reducing federal civilian personnel pay ($100 billion over ten years), or restoring additional IRS funding ($100 billion over ten years).

One bee I have in my bonnet is when policymakers wave away policy options by saying they are “too expensive.” I recall being at a public meeting in 2019 where an activist floated the idea of doing away with bus fares in central Ohio. A policymaker responded to the idea by saying it was “prohibitively expensive.” Bus fares at the time made up about one-sixth of the operating funds for the central Ohio bus system, something in the range of $20 million of the total budget of about $120 million. Yes, that is a lot of money. But it is not an impossible amount of money to raise.

Policy decisions should be made on the merits of the policy tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a free lunch: any policy has tradeoffs. But to treat these tradeoffs as a bogeyman, an unknowable, all-powerful force that cannot be questioned, is public policy malpractice. Forgiveness of $220 million of medical debt might seem like a steep price, but I just showed over a dozen paths using public information to make that a reality. And so many other public policy problems are like this. Sure, maybe none of these are worth it. Maybe it is more important for, for instance, federal civilian personnel to have the full pay increase structure they have right now rather than one that is a little more conservative. But I think most people would agree that at least some of these options seem like reasonable tradeoffs for universal cancellation of medical debt.

And these are just revenue-neutral options for debt cancellation. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase the federal debt by $4.3 trillion over ten years. The Inflation Reduction Act was cheaper, but still cost $780 billion. The Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act cost $1.2 trillion. The American Rescue Plan cost $1.9-3.5 trillion. So when policymakers want to spend, they do.

Medical debt impacts households. Cancelling it could help families become more fiscally stable, give them better access to credit, and even improve their health. And policymakers have many options to do so without impacting the federal deficit.

Survey: Majority of economists agree that misalignment between education and workforce training and employer skill demands limits job growth

In a survey released this morning by Scioto Analysis, 11 of 18 economists agreed that a misalignment between Ohio’s education and workforce training systems and employer skill demands is limiting statewide job growth. 

Job growth in Ohio is currently down. According to a 2022 report by the Greater Ohio Policy Center, the state labor force declined by 91,000 between 2000 and 2020. Despite unemployment rates in Ohio decreasing in the last few months of 2025, the labor force actually shrunk.

Respondents voiced opinions that more focus is needed on aligning education and workforce training and employer skill demands in the state, but many economists agreed that this problem is not unique to Ohio. As Bill Lafeyette of Regionomics commented, “Based on my work with educational institutions, linkages between these institutions and business need to be enhanced. It has always been important for graduates to leave school with the work-ready skills (communication, responsibility, integrity, leadership, teamwork, etc.) that can spell the difference between success and failure in a career. But now with the pace of technological change, schools need to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs of business, and graduates need to recognize that they must keep their skills current or run the risk of irrelevance.”

Opinions on if Ohio’s regulatory environment has a negative effect on job growth relative to comparable states were mixed. Two economists agreed that the regulatory environment has a negative effect on job growth, eight economists disagreed, and six economists were uncertain. According to Bob Gitter of Ohio Wesleyan University, “Compared to other states, our regulatory environment is not that strict. There may be an effect but if so, it is a small one.” David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati, who agreed with the sentiment, noted that “Ohio has 246,033 regulatory restrictions, ranking it 6th in the nation, although the legislature is making a conscious effort to reduce this number.”

The majority of economists disagreed that Ohio’s tax structure negatively affects the location and retention decisions of high-skill workers, with twelve economists disagreeing and four economists agreeing. Curtis Reynolds of Kent State University noted, “Income taxes are not sufficiently high enough relative to other states to have a large effect on retention of high-skilled workers. Furthermore, the income tax has been reduced over the last 20 years without clear evidence of increased retention of those workers.”

The Ohio Economic Experts Panel is a panel of over 30 Ohio Economists from over 30 Ohio higher educational institutions conducted by Scioto Analysis. The goal of the Ohio Economic Experts Panel is to promote better policy outcomes by providing policymakers, policy influencers, and the public with the informed opinions of Ohio’s leading economists. Individual responses to all surveys can be found here.

The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ may mean the end of food assistance in Ohio

Last year, Congress rushed to push through all of the president’s wish list as H.R. 1, the “Big Beautiful Bill Act,” while the new president’s honeymoon poll numbers were still intact.

The bill enacted a range of policies, including making President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent, exempting tips and overtime from federal income taxes, and requiring new work requirements for safety net features like Medicaid.

One item that flew under the radar for many but has been reported by the Cleveland-based Center for Community Solutions since last year is a provision that changes the funding structure for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, previously known as “food stamps”).

The new law enacted new requirements on states, requiring them to reduce benefit provision error rates or be required to pick up larger parts of the tab for SNAP.

The problem with this requirement is that Congress set the required error rate so low that only seven states would have achieved it in 2024.

According to the Center for Community Solutions, Ohio’s error rate was 9% in 2024 and if Ohio’s rate is that high in 2026, the state will be on the hook for $318 million in SNAP payments that it previously did not have to pay.

An estimate by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality in September put that number at closer to $390 million.

It seems like whomever you ask, Ohio will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars if it wants to keep its SNAP program.

To understand the scale of this, a $318 million new SNAP obligation would make Ohio’s new SNAP obligation on its own as expensive as a top-10 agency in the state government.

That would make continuing to fund SNAP as expensive as Ohio’s entire Department of Natural Resources, Department of Health, and Department of Transportation combined according to Legislative Service Commission data.

$300 million or more is no tiny line item, even for a large state like Ohio.

Ohio has previously balked at proposals for $300 million food programs, so there is a strong scenario that Ohio ends up with a $300 million tab from the federal government later this year and state legislators balk at it, leading to the end of the SNAP program in Ohio.

SNAP is a big deal.

It is one of the largest antipoverty programs in the country, pulling an estimated 3.6 million Americans out of poverty.

In our 2024 study of poverty in Ohio, we estimated that over 1.5% of the state population is kept out of poverty by SNAP. That means that under a conservative scenario, 180,000 Ohio residents would be plunged into poverty by dropping the program.

SNAP is a program that reduces poverty, reduces food insecurity, and supports local grocers.

Losing the $260 million a month that the federal government finances in grocery spending in Ohio through SNAP will mean the closing of grocery stores that serve low-income households across the state, especially considering the low margins grocery stores run on.

This could be especially devastating for low-income, rural communities like Vinton County, Ohio, which endured a stint a decade ago where it had no grocery store throughout the entire county.

Ohio is on the precipice of facing the consequences of H.R. 1.

Hopefully federal policymakers realize the dangers of playing chicken with the U.S. safety net and decide to pump the brakes, otherwise hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in Ohio will suffer.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

What is a school-based health center?

Whether it was to deal with scrapes on the playground or to get treatment for your “illness” that kept you out of class, everyone who went to school has an experience with the school nurse’s office. Over the past few decades, though, policymakers have been turning to schools more and more to provide health care services.

Intervention in childhood can be the most cost-effective time to provide preventative health care, impacting things like test scores and propensity to develop chronic disease later in life. Due to policy changes like the Children’s Health Insurance Act (CHIP) and the Affordable Care Act, many low-income children have gained health insurance coverage but have not necessarily gained access to health care. Health care deserts and lack of information held by parents have conspired to make it difficult for children to gain access to health care when they need it most.

Enter the school-based health center. In its simplest form, a school-based health center is a medical clinic that is located on a school campus. Proximity to the place where children spend most of their days allows a school-based health center to provide preventative and screening care in a way that regular health centers are not able to.

The Ohio School-Based Health Alliance, a statewide organization focused on supporting school-based health centers across the state, has established a six-point definition of a “school-based health center.”

School-based health centers are health care centers based on school campuses serving students at that school and sometimes their families, school personnel, and community members. These centers focus on primary care and sometimes provide behavioral health, vision, oral, and other health services as needed by the community. Center staff work to improve both health and educational outcomes and coordinate care with school nurses and other school personnel to ensure services are complementary and not duplicative. School-based health centers are run by outside organizations like federally qualified health centers, hospitals, public health departments and nonprofit agencies and provide care during the school day. They also conform to federal, state, and local medical licensing, information, and consent laws.

School-based health centers are not a replacement for the nurse’s office system: they are a complement that provide different services and supports. Nurse’s offices are focused on triage, public health functions, and providing universal care for students. School-based health centers allow care to also be targeted, providing clinical care that is scheduled and focused on the needs of students in a specific community. Investing in school-based health centers does not create a replacement for school nurse’s offices: a system that invests in health centers without investing in nurse’s offices could lead to more public health problems in the long-run. But by complementing resources already available, school-based health centers can create a more resilient overall health system.

School-based health centers help the community deal with access gaps, utilize the school as a locus of health care issues, and deal with youth mental health issues.

In March 2024, the National Residency Match Program announced that the percentage of pediatric-residency positions that were filled through the program fell from 97% in 2023 to 92% in 2024. This means fewer doctors are training to help children, making it more difficult for children to get access to primary care. Families also face barriers due to transportation issues. In a study done on access to primary care, families cited transportation barriers as a top 3 issue for why they could not make primary care appointments. Families are also juggling work, insurance changes, and long wait times, which make access to primary care difficult. School-based health centers help reduce these barriers by locating qualified primary care workers in places of easy access to children: schools.

School-based health centers also help schools face the reality that they are acting as de facto health care providers. Teachers, school counselors, and administrators are managing health conditions like asthma, diabetes, anxiety, and traumatic stress on a daily basis. My fiancée is a high school math teacher, but I often joke (only half facetiously) that she is a social worker who happens to also teach math. With a wide range of parent involvement in children's lives, many children turn to teachers and other adults at school for help with health issues. School-based health centers help bring professionals with training that teachers, administrators, and often even school nurses don’t have to the school context to handle these tasks.

All this is happening at a time when children’s mental health issues are on the rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16% of children age 12-17 have a current, diagnosed condition, 8.7% have a current, diagnosed depression condition, and 6.8% have a current, diagnosed behavioral disorder. These conditions impact a child’s ability to learn, but they also impact teachers’ ability to teach in the classroom and other children’s ability to learn. Providing proper screening and referral for these conditions through school-based health centers can be an effective tool for treating these conditions and improving the educational environment for children.

The rise of in school-based health centers reflects the reality that schools have become central locations for health care delivery to children. Schools are where children spend a significant proportion of their time, so it should not be surprising that this is where they will receive health care, especially students with chronic conditions. State investment in school-based health centers reflects not only this fact but also the fact that investing in children is a long-term investment in the state’s education system, economy, and public health.

School-based health centers will not solve all health problems for children. They are, however, a useful tool for promoting individual health and providing services in places where children go throughout the week and year. By removing barriers to access, school-based health centers can help identify conditions that may not be identified otherwise and can provide care that school nurses are not equipped to provide without sacrificing their vital triage and public health functions. The growth of school-based health centers represents an adaptation of the health care system to meet needs and promote public health where children are today.

What the EPA’s health impact rule change means

In a recent rule, the Environmental Protection Agency decided that they would no longer be considering the monetary value of health impacts that result from the emission of fine particles. Their justification for this change is that there is uncertainty around how to monetize these health impacts. The EPA is saying that they still plan to quantify these impacts, just not monetize them. Still, this change is likely to have significant impacts in terms of rulemaking and seems very likely to reduce restrictions on polluters. 

We’ve actually written before about some of the discourse surrounding calculations for the value of statistical life and how this is an open discussion in the field of cost-benefit analysis. The EPA is just stating the facts when they say that there is uncertainty around the best way to monetize health impacts.

However, uncertainty is not a reason to ignore an impact entirely. 

As far as I am aware, there is nobody in the cost-benefit analysis world that thinks that the value of statistical life is an invalid way to monetize health impacts. There are plenty of discussions about what the best estimate is, but everyone agrees there should be some estimate. 

Ignoring the dollar value of lives saved will make future EPA cost-benefit analyses incomplete. I don’t expect every possible outcome to be measured and monetized, but evidence has shown that humans tend to ascribe a significant amount of value to reducing their risk of death. It is so often true that the value of lives saved is the largest economic benefit to a program or policy, especially those that involve harmful pollutants like PM2.5.

A better way to handle this uncertainty would have been through sensitivity analysis. Other agencies have their preferred values for the value of statistical life, researchers have been advancing the research on what the value of statistical life should be, particularly for groups not involved in the labor market. Analysts can always (and should always) talk about the uncertainty of their estimates, meaning this should be standard practice no matter what.

Another reason EPA should continue to use these estimates in their cost-benefit analysis is that cost-benefit analysis is not the only determining factor when it comes to choosing policies! There are completely valid reasons for EPA or anyone else to do a cost-benefit analysis, determine that a policy has costs that outweigh benefits, and choose to implement it anyways. Choosing to ignore an impact doesn’t make it go away, it just means we have less information and are likely to make worse decisions.

One of the most common problems with research is when people are overly confident about a result and it turns out to be wrong. This is why at Scioto Analysis we spend so much time talking about sensitivity analysis. To safeguard against overconfidence, we need to show people how our estimates may vary when they are exposed to real world conditions. 

This EPA rule change feels intentionally misleading to me. Whether it’s fair or not, calling a research project a cost-benefit analysis and assigning a monetary value to a policy change attaches it to the credibility of all the researchers who have spent their lives working on this topic. Voluntarily ignoring a major outcome and presenting the results as finished cost-benefit analysis not only leads to worse decisions, but it harms the credibility of the entire research field.

Original Analysis: Oklahoma Minimum Wage Hike would Boost State Economy

A new labor market and economic impact analysis from This Land Research and Communications Collaborative, produced by Scioto Analysis, finds that raising Oklahoma’s minimum wage to $15 would increase earnings for low-income families, reduce low-wage employment across the state, close wage gaps between groups, and generate more than $1.1 billion in annual economic growth.

“The analysis shows that a $15 minimum wage would improve earnings for workers across Oklahoma while growing the state’s overall economy,” Rob Moore, Principal for Scioto Analysis said, “These findings make clear that raising the minimum wage is an effective tool for reducing low-wage employment and boosting household incomes in both rural and urban areas.”

Key Findings from the Report

• A $15 Wage Boosts Earnings. Workers directly affected by the policy will see a 25% increase in weekly earnings, with the average impacted worker gaining $100 more per week—or roughly $4,200 more per year. This additional income would help Oklahoma families keep pace with rising costs and strengthen long-term economic security.

• Oklahoma’s Wage Gap with the Nation Narrows. Oklahoma workers currently earn 25% less than the average U.S. worker, even after accounting for cost-of-living differences. A $15 minimum wage will cut that gap nearly in half, giving Oklahomans a more competitive wage relative to the rest of the country.

• Low-Wage Work Drops Sharply. The share of Oklahomans in low-wage jobs will fall by 29% under a $15 minimum wage, with more than 100,000 workers rising above low-wage status. This shift would lead to reduced economic volatility and greater workforce stability for employers.

• Oklahoma’s Economy Grows by Over $1 Billion. Higher earnings and increased spending will boost the state’s GDP by $1.1 billion annually, the report finds. Additionally, employers will benefit from an estimated $880 million in productivity gains, driven by lower turnover and higher worker retention.

• Rural–Urban Wage Gaps Shrink. Wage disparities across counties will narrow substantially under a $15 wage. For many counties, especially in rural Oklahoma, the gains would be as large  as those seen in urban centers.

This study is the fourth in a series of studies conducted by Scioto Analysis on the minimum wage in Oklahoma. Refer to the Scioto Analysis projects page for past studies on the minimum wage’s impact on housing, public safety, and health.

Is Ohio’s population decline overrated?

According to the Ohio Department of Development, Ohio’s population will shrink from 11.8 million people in 2020 to 11.1 million people in 2050.

To many policymakers in Ohio, this is a key public policy issue. Last year, Gov. Mike DeWine urged university officials to ramp-up recruitment efforts to “keep more talent in the state of Ohio.”

There is some truth to the benefits of population growth to population vitality.

New people means new ideas, new businesses, new consumers. I like living in a city with a vibrant immigrant community where I can eat foods from places like the Philippines and go to karaoke nights where people sing Brazilian standards.

I also like having friends from states ranging from Pennsylvania to California who have different backgrounds and life experiences from me.

But population decline can be a symptom as much as a cause of quality of life problems, if not more.

The slowest-growing states in the country, West Virginia and Mississippi, are also states that struggle with the highest poverty rates, lowest educational attainment, and lowest life expectancies.

Understanding causality is hard here, though.

Surely people with higher education and income have more ability to move from state to state, meaning part of what is causing these poor statistics is just losing people who are better off.

On the other hand, there are reasons they are leaving, too, that could be attributed to quality of life.

Then there are the exceptional states like Vermont, which is one of the slowest growing states in the country despite having one of the lowest poverty rates and some of the highest educational attainment and life expectancies among U.S. states.

Clearly there is something happening with Vermont. Meanwhile, Montana had bottom-five population growth in 2024, but is around the middle of the country when it comes to poverty, education, and life expectancy.

So what should we make of Ohio’s population growth trajectory?

Compared to the rest of the country, Ohio has a high poverty rate (top half of U.S. states), low bachelor’s degree attainment (bottom half of U.S. states), and low life expectancy (bottom half of U.S. states). That means Ohio looks a lot more like the Mississippis and West Virginias of the country than it looks like Vermont and Montana.

If this is the case, population decline could be an indicator for deeper quality of life problems in the state.

Ultimately, these other statistics matter more to Ohio’s trajectory than population growth.

If Ohio lost 700,000 residents on net due to births, natural deaths, and migration rates but the poverty rate declined, bachelor’s degree attainment improved, and life expectancies rose, I think pretty much everyone would agree the state would be better off than it was before.

Targeting public policy toward reducing poverty, increasing educational attainment, and improving public health will likely lead to a more well-off state population than one that focuses squarely on population growth.

Let’s realize that quality of life is the most important consideration for Ohio residents, not how many people decide to move in or out of the state.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.