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...

This paper analyzes the extent of rigidities in wage setting in Great Britain over the 1980s and 1990s. Our estimation strategy, which generalizes the work of Altonji and Devereux (2000), models the notional wage growth distribution - the distribution of nominal wage growth that would occur in...

The industrial Midwest, sometimes referred to disparagingly as the “Rust Belt,” has long been recognized as a distinct economic region and an important contributor to the US economy. Prior research has emphasized the role that losses in the manufacturing sector have played in the plight of...

This paper studies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes for prime-age men and women between 2006 and 2016. We estimate the relationship at the most disaggregated level feasible in the American Community Survey in order to provide estimates that...

Earnings data are often reported in round numbers. In fact, in the March 1995 Current Population Survey (CPS), 71% of all full-time earnings responses are some multiple of $1,000. Rounding is typically ignored in analyses of earnings data, which effectively treats it as noise in the data. Our...

The large shift of U.S. employment from goods producers to service producers has generated concern over future income distribution, because of perceived large relative pay differences. This paper applies a nonparametric density overlap statistic to compare the sectors distribution of full-time,...

This article reviews a well-established macroeconomic literature -- wage rigidity -- from the perspective of human resource managers and economic researchers. As we demonstrate, human resource policies can subtly alter the rigidity of wages. Fortunately, the potential existence and impact of...

We examine quarterly microlevel data on labor market transitions taken from the Current Population Survey from 1990 to 2014 to estimate how the business cycle affects transitions into and out of self-employment from other labor market states. We control for individual demographics and...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals' earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

Real average U.S. per capita personal income growth over the last 65 years exceeded a remarkable 400 percent. Also notable over this period is that the stark income differences across states have narrowed considerably: In 1939 the highest income state's per capita personal income was 4.5 times...