The very first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit-industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for...

Does requiring job seekers to be available and searching for work affect job quality? We examine the effects of this unemployment insurance (UI) work test on long-term employment outcomes. Adding administrative wage records to the Washington Alternative Work Search (WAWS) experiment, we examine...

The very first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit-industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for...

We highlight the importance of randomisation bias, a situation where the process of participation in a social experiment has been affected by randomisation per se. We illustrate how this has happened in the case of the UK Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) experiment, in which over one...

One of the most powerful critiques of the use of randomised experiments in the social sciences is the possibility that individuals might react to the randomisation itself, thereby rendering the causal inference from the experiment irrelevant for policy purposes. In this paper we set out a...

The concept of human dignity provides a useful reference point for evaluating American exceptionalism in the context of welfare rights. Since World War II, human dignity has emerged as the preeminent value in many modern constitutions and various human rights documents. Particularly in countries...

This essay sets out a progressive workplace regulatory policy that can also prove institutionally and politically tractable. I lay out a broad regulatory agenda on normative grounds and then discuss how existing federal workplace policies provide for those ends. Given this "installed base" of...

Legal rules governing the employer-employee relationship are many and varied. Economic analysis has illuminated both the efficiency and the effects on employee welfare of such rules, as described in this chapter, to appear in the Law and Economics volume of the Handbooks of Economics series....

This Article presents an original empirical analysis demonstrating that low-income families experience far greater income fluctuations than higher-income families and, as a result, taxation of annual income disproportionately burdens low-income families. The author proposes two simple income...