A central issue in estimating the employment effects of minimum wages is the appropriate comparison group for states (or other regions) that adopt or increase the minimum wage. In recent research, Dube et al. (Rev Econ Stat 92:945-964, 2010) and Allegretto et al. (Ind Relat 50:205-240, 2011)...

This paper tests whether school-to-work (STW) programs are particularly beneficial for those less likely to go to college in their absence often termed the forgotten half in the STW literature. The empirical analysis is based on the NLSY97, which allows us to study six types of STW programs,...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

We examine the effects of employment-contingent health insurance on married women's labor supply following a health shock. First, we develop a theoretical model that examines the effects of employment-contingent health insurance on the labor supply response to a health shock, to clarify under...

We estimate the effects of Wal-Mart stores on county-level retail employment and earnings, accounting for endogeneity of the location and timing of Wal-Mart openings that most likely biases the evidence against finding adverse effects of Wal-Mart stores. We address the endogeneity problem using...

We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s. Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a...

We study the effects of minimum wages and the EITC in the post-welfare reform era. For the minimum wage, the evidence points to disemployment effects that are concentrated among young minority men. For young women, there is little evidence that minimum wages reduce employment, with the exception...

The principal means by which individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency is through labor market earnings. As a consequence, it is natural for policy makers to look to interventions that increase the ability of individuals and families to achieve an adequate standard of living...

We use a new database, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), to revisit the debate about the role of small businesses in job creation. Birch (e.g., 1987) argued that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy. But Davis et al. (1996a) argued that this...

We specify and implement a test for the importance of network effects in determining the establishments at which people work, using recently-constructed matched employer-employee data at the establishment level. We explicitly measure the importance of network effects for groups broken out by...