The economic impact of the 2007-2009 increases in the federal minimum wage (MW) is analyzed using a sample of quick-service restaurants in Georgia and Alabama. Store-level bi-weekly payroll records for individual employees are used, allowing us to precisely measure the MW compliance cost for...

The institutional and industrial relations schools were the dominant groups in labor economics into the 1960s (Boyer and Smith 2001; Kaufman 2006) and among early writers the British husband-wife team of Sidney and Beatrice Webb played a particularly important role – per the Wolman epigraph (also...

The most famous and influential diagram in modern (neoclassical) labor economics is the model of wage determination by supply and demand. Using concepts and ideas from institutional economics, I argue that the theory of a perfectly competitive labor market is logically contradictory and, hence,...

The methodological approaches of Ronald Coase and Richard Posner are compared and contrasted with regard to microeconomic theory and its application to law and economics. The central divide is whether positive transaction cost requires a major reworking of the core of neoclassical price theory...

The law of one wage does not strictly hold, nor should it be expected to hold, in contemporary labor markets. The law of one wage, however, provides a surprisingly good first approximation of the structure of U.S. wages. This generalization is drawn from research on a diverse set of topics: the...

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper builds on prior research and documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings...

Employer mandates and other labor demand/supply shocks typically have small effects on wages and employment. These effects should be more discernible using data on employment transitions and wages among new hires rather than incumbents. The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) dataset provides...

Earnings nonresponse in household surveys is widespread, yet there is limited knowledge of how nonresponse biases earnings measures. We examine the consequences of nonresponse on earnings gaps and inequality using Current Population Survey individual records linked to administrative earnings...

Earnings nonresponse in the Current Population Survey is roughly 30% in the monthly surveys and 20% in the annual March survey. Even if nonresponse is random, severe bias attaches to wage equation coefficient estimates on attributes not matched in the earnings imputation hot deck. If nonresponse...

Economists and sociologists have proposed arguments for why there can exist wage penalties for work involving helping and caring for others, penalties borne disproportionately by women. Evidence on wage penalties is neither abundant nor compelling. We examine wage differentials associated with...