Job Guarantee Research

The job guarantee is the centrepiece policy proposal of Modern Monetary Theory. It offers a federally funded, locally administered public service job at a living wage to anyone who is ready and willing to work. The concept is simple: instead of using unemployment as a buffer stock to control inflation, use employment. Instead of paying people to do nothing during downturns, pay them to do something useful for their communities.

The theoretical basis for the job guarantee lies in the buffer stock employment model developed by Warren Mosler and further elaborated by L. Randall Wray, Pavlina Tcherneva, and Fadhel Kaboub. The core insight is that a currency-issuing government can always afford to hire the unemployed, because the real cost of unemployment, the lost output, social decay, and human suffering, is always greater than the cost of employing people in productive work. The job guarantee acts as an automatic stabiliser: the programme expands during recessions as private sector workers move into guaranteed jobs, and contracts during booms as workers are hired away by the private sector at higher wages.

Critically, the job guarantee serves as a price anchor. By setting a wage floor, it establishes a minimum standard that the private sector must match. Unlike the current system, which uses unemployment to discipline workers and suppress wages, the job guarantee achieves price stability through full employment. Tcherneva's research demonstrates that this approach produces more stable prices with less human cost than the NAIRU framework used by mainstream central banks. Kaboub's work extends the analysis to developing economies, showing how job guarantee programmes can address structural unemployment in countries with large informal sectors.

The research collected here spans the full range of job guarantee analysis: from foundational theoretical work by Mosler and Wray, through empirical studies of existing programmes like Argentina's Jefes de Hogar and India's NREGA, to cost estimates produced by the Levy Economics Institute. Use the Job Guarantee Calculator to model the cost and employment impact for any US state, and explore the evidence for why full employment is both achievable and affordable.