Putting a Human Face on the Minimum Wage

What is a “livable wage,” and should we strive to raise wages for American workers? There are lots of conflicting studies and reports. The Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to$10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs while raising the incomes of nearly 17 million Americans. Even prominent economists like David Card and David Neumark diametrically disagree on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage, and their studies of results in New Jersey have consistently yielded conflicting results for decades. [excerpt

How Can California Spur Job Creation?

Analyzes the costs, effectiveness, and short- and long-term implications of implementing hiring credits for employers and a state Earned Income Tax Credit as policy options to boost job creation. Makes policy recommendations for maximizing impact

Detecting Discrimination in Audit and Correspondence Studies

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However, Heckman and Siegelman (1993) show that group differences in the variance of unobservable determinants of productivity can still generate spurious evidence of discrimination in either direction. This paper shows how to recover an unbiased estimate of discrimination when the correspondence study includes variation in applicant characteristics that affect hiring. The method is applied to actual data and assessed using Monte Carlo methods.

Living Wages: Protection For or Protection From Low-Wage Workers?

Living wage laws, which were introduced in the mid-1990s and have expanded rapidly since then, are typically touted as anti-poverty measures. Yet they frequently restrict coverage to employers with city contracts, and in such cases apply to a small fraction of workers. This apparent contradiction leads to the question of whether there are alternative motivations for various economic and political actors to seek passage of living wage laws. This paper considers the hypothesis that unions representing municipal employees work for the implementation of living wage laws to maintain or increase rents. By raising the wages that city contractors would have to pay, living wage laws may reduce the incentives for cities to contract out work that would otherwise be done by municipal employees, hence increasing the bargaining power of municipal unions and leading to higher wages. The empirical analysis leads to evidence that the wages of unionized municipal workers are increased as a result of living wages. This evidence does not imply that living wages offer no assistance to low-wage workers or low-income families. However, it suggests that alternative policies intended to achieve the goal of reducing urban poverty may be more effective, as living wage laws may result more from considerations of self-interest of narrow but politically-powerful groups of workers than from consideration of the optimal way of achieving this goal.

Age Discrimination Legislation in the United States

Legislation prohibiting age discrimination in the United States dates back to the decade of the 1960s, when along with the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act barring discrimination against women and minorities, the U.S. Congress passed the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Many critical issues regarding the rationale for or effectiveness of age discrimination legislation have been addressed, and continue to be studied, by researchers in both economics and law, while many questions remain. These questions are likely to become increasingly important as rapidly aging workforces in the United States and other industrialized countries threaten to vastly increase the social costs of any barriers to older workers' employment. This paper provides a summary, critical review, and synthesis of what we know about age discrimination legislation. It first traces out the legislative history and the evolving case law, and discusses implementation of the law. It then moves on to review the existing research on age discrimination legislation research that addresses the rationale for the legislation, evidence on its effectiveness, and criticisms of age discrimination legislation.

Do California's Enterprise Zones Create Jobs?

Examines how the state's enterprise zone program, which offered incentives in economically distressed areas, affected job and business creation in 1992-2004. Considers elements of relative success such as marketing and outreach and suggests improvements

Do Stronger Age Discrimination Laws Make Social Security Reforms More Effective?

Supply-side Social Security reforms to increase employment and delay benefit claiming among older individuals may be frustrated by age discrimination. We test for policy complementarities between supply-side Social Security reforms and demand-side efforts to deter age discrimination, specifically studying whether stronger state-level age discrimination protections enhanced the impact of the increases in the Social Security Full Retirement Age (FRA) that occurred in the past decade. The evidence indicates that, for older individuals who were “caught” by the increase in the FRA, benefit claiming reductions and employment increases were sharper in states with stronger age discrimination protections.

Relative Income Concerns and the Rise in Married Women's Employment

We ask whether women's decisions to be in the labor force may be affected by the decisions of other women in ways not captured by standard models. We develop a model that augments the simple neoclassical framework by introducing relative income concerns into women's (or families') utility functions. In this model, the entry of some women into paid employment can spur the entry of other women, independently of wage and income effects. This mechanism may help to explain why, over some periods, women's employment appeared to rise faster than could be accounted for by the simple neoclassical model. We test the model by asking whether women's decisions to seek paid employment depend on the employment decisions of other women with whom relative income comparisons might be important. In particular, we look at the effects of sisters' employment on women's own employment. We find strong evidence that women's employment decisions are positively related to their sisters' employment decisions. We also take account of the possibility that this positive relationship arises from heterogeneity across families in unobserved variables affecting the employment decision. We conduct numerous empirical analyses to reduce or eliminate this heterogeneity bias. We also look at the relationship between husbands' relative income and wives' employment decisions. In our view, the evidence is largely supportive of the relative income hypothesis.

Minimum Wage Effects in the Longer Run

Exposure to minimum wages at young ages may lead to longer-run effects. Among the possible adverse longer-run effects are decreased labor market experience and accumulation of tenure, lower current labor supply because of lower wages, and diminished training and skill acquisition. Beneficial longer-run effects could arise if minimum wages increase skill acquisition, or if short-term wage increases are long-lasting. We estimate the longer-run effects of minimum wages by using information on the minimum wage history that workers have faced since potentially entering the labor market. The evidence indicates that even as individuals reach their late 20's, they work less and earn less the longer they were exposed to a higher minimum wage, especially as a teenager. The adverse longer-run effects of facing high minimum wages as a teenager are stronger for blacks. From a policy perspective, these longer-run effects of minimum wages are likely more significant than the contemporaneous effects of minimum wages on youths that are the focus of most research and policy debate.

Training and the Growth of Wage Inequality

Shifts in the incidence of various types of training over the 1980s favored more-educated, more-experienced workers. Coupled with the fact that this training is associated with higher wages, these shifts suggest that training may have contributed to the growth of wage inequality in this period. However, the shifts were apparently too small, or the returns to training too low, for training to have played a substantial role in this increase. The estimated changes in wage differentials associated with schooling and experience are at best only slightly smaller once we account for changes in the distribution of training across schooling and experience groups, as well as changes in the returns to training and in the length of training programs.