We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s. Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a...

We study the effects of minimum wages and the EITC in the post-welfare reform era. For the minimum wage, the evidence points to disemployment effects that are concentrated among young minority men. For young women, there is little evidence that minimum wages reduce employment, with the exception...

We revisit the minimum wage-employment debate, which is as old as the Department of Labor. In particular, we assess new studies claiming that the standard panel data approach used in much of the new minimum wage research is flawed because it fails to account for spatial heterogeneity. These new...

The primary goal of a national minimum wage floor is to raise the incomes of poor families with members in the work force. We present evidence on the effects of minimum wages on family incomes from March CPS surveys. Using non-parametric estimates of the distributions of family income relative...

Minimum wages help some families to escape poverty, but employment losses associated with raising the minimum also appear to cause some families to fall into poverty. The authors' estimates suggest that on balance, the second of these effects outweighs the first; therefore, the net result of...

We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages—in the United States and other countries—that was spurred by the "new minimum wage research" beginning in the early 1990's. The wide range of existing estimates makes it difficult for us to draw broad...

This paper evaluates the effects of the earned income tax credit (EITC) on poor families’ earnings. Exploiting state-level variation in EITCs, we find that the EITC helps families rise above poverty-level earnings, primarily by inducing labor market entry in families that initially do not have...

A central issue in estimating the employment effects of minimum wages is the appropriate comparison group for states (or other regions) that adopt or increase the minimum wage. In recent research, Dube et al. (Rev Econ Stat 92:945-964, 2010) and Allegretto et al. (Ind Relat 50:205-240, 2011)...