This study examines how minimum wage laws affect the employment and earnings of low-skilled immigrants and natives in the United States. Minimum wage increases might have larger effects among low-skilled immigrants than among natives because, on average, immigrants earn less than natives due to...

The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage. The pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided...

Previous research has reached mixed conclusions about whether higher levels of immigration reduce the wages of natives. This paper reexamines this question using data from the Current Population Survey and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and focuses on differential effects by skill...

Because Latinos comprise a large and growing share of the low-skilled labor force in the U.S., Latinos may be disproportionately affected by minimum wage laws. We compare the effects of minimum wage laws on employment and earnings among Hispanic immigrants and natives compared with non-Hispanic...

The transformation of the U.S. border economy since the 1980s provides a fascinating backdrop to explore how migration to the U.S-side of the Mexican border has changed vis-a-vis migration to the U.S. interior. Some long-standing patterns of border migrants remained unchanged during this period...

The 1996 welfare law ends most noncitizens' eligibility for federally funded public assistance programs and allows states to cut off payments under other welfare programs to noncitizens. If some states choose to continue extending benefits while others terminate payments to immigrants,...

Limited access to migrant networks and strong geographic preferences may underlie border migrants' willingness to settle for lower wages on the border rather than seek higher wages by venturing into the U.S. interior.

The rising minimum wage has important implications for Texas, which unlike other big states sets its minimum wage equal to the federal one.

In standard cross-sectional wage regressions, married men appear to earn 10 to 20% more than comparable never married men. One proposed explanation for this male marriage premium is that men may be selected into marriage on the basis of characteristics valued by employers as well as by spouses...