The paper finds a strong negative correlation between youth employment and minimum wages for the panel of U.S. states, 1976-2007. Such a correlation is not observed in earlier panels. The source of the new results is traced to the greater variance of minimum wages across states emerging after...

Despite the abundance of different econometric techniques introduced in the empirical literature on convergence, it is usually assumed that shocks are uncorrelated across countries. This is surely unlikely for most of the datasets considered and we investigate a possibility so far ignored,...