In public debate, the pros and cons of the minimum wage are frequently boiled down to simple tradeoff between earnings gains and job losses. This chapter argues that an exclusive focus on tradeoffs between earnings gains and job losses is too narrow, as firms can make myriad adjustments to blunt...

Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending outside of safety-net programs. At the beginnings of recessions, states tend to experience unexpected deficits. While all states ultimately pay these deficits down, differences in the stringency of...

Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending on infrastructure and public services. Differences in the stringency of states’ budget rules drive the pace at which they must make these adjustments. We show that budget rules (and other fiscal...

Clemens and Wither (2014) find that minimum wage increases contributed to employment declines among low-skilled individuals during the Great Recession. Zipperer (2016) argues that Clemens and Wither's estimates are biased. This paper assesses what underlies the difference between Zipperer's...

This paper examines a ``falsification test'' from the recent minimum wage literature. The analysis illustrates several pitfalls associated with developing and interpreting such exercises, which are increasingly common in applied empirical work. Clemens and Wither (2014) present evidence that...

In previous work (Clemens and Wither, 2014), we reported evidence that minimum wage increases contributed to declines in low-skilled individuals' employment during the Great Recession. Because this work has generated both interest and disagreement, we use the current paper to present the code...

The new conventional wisdom holds that a large increase in the minimum wage would be desirable policy. Advocates for this policy dismiss the traditional concern that such an increase would lower employment for many of the low-skilled workers that the increase is intended to help. Recent economic...

Efforts to maintain balanced budgets lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in states' capital investments, transfers to local governments, and spending in areas like education and transportation. Reliance on volatile revenue sources predicts relatively severe volatility in these expenditures....

In the mid-2000s, U.S. anti-opium policy intensified with a goal of reducing the resources available to Afghan insurgents. To achieve this objective, I show that opium suppression efforts must accurately distinguish between insurgent and non-insurgent suppliers. The required level of accuracy...

We present data characterizing the U.S. labor market during the Great Recession and subsequent recovery. U.S. employment declines were dramatic among young adults, substantial among prime-aged adults, and modest among those near retirement. The decline in employment among working-age adults...