The Minimum Wage and Inequality - The Effects of Education and Technology

While there has been intense debate in the empirical literature about the effects of minimum wages on inequality in the US, its general equilibrium effects have been given little attention. In order to quantify the full effects of a decreasing minimum wage on inequality, I build a dynamic general equilibrium model, based on a two-sector growth model where the supply of high-skilled workers and the direction of technical change are endogenous. I find that a permanent reduction in the minimum wage leads to an expansion of low-skilled employment, which increases the incentives to acquire skills, thus changing the composition and size of high-skilled employment. These permanent changes in the supply of labour alter the investment flow into R&D, thereby decreasing the skill-bias of technology. The reduction in the minimum wage has spill-over effects on the entire distribution, affecting upper-tail inequality. Through a calibration exercise, I find that a 30 percent reduction in the real value of the minimum wage, as in the early 1980s, accounts for 15 percent of the subsequent rise in the skill premium, 18.5 percent of the increase in overall inequality, 45 percent of the increase in inequality in the bottom half, and 7 percent of the rise in inequality at the top half of the wage distribution.Minimum wage, education, technology, wage inequality

Job Polarization and Structural Change

We document that job polarization -contrary to the consensus- has started as early as the 1950s in the US: middle-wage workers have been losing both in terms of employment and average wage growth compared to low- and high-wage workers. Given that polarization is a long-run phenomenon and closely linked to the shift from manufacturing to services, we propose a structural change driven explanation, where we explicitly model the sectoral choice of workers. Our simple model does remarkably well not only in matching the evolution of sectoral employment, but also of relative wages over the past fifty years

Taxation and self-employment

In this paper I theoretically show that if the self-employed evade income taxes, then the choice of being self-employed is more sensitive to the tax rates on wages than to tax rates on income from self-employment. Using variation in the statutory tax rates across countries, industries, and occupations, I find evidence that supports the predictions of the model. This suggests that those who choose self-employment, partly do so to take advantage of the technology it offers in evading taxes. This extensive margin of adjustment - between employment and self-employment - should be taken into account when considering the effects of tax rates on labor income, on taxable income and on welfare

Disentangling Occupation- and Sector-specific Technological Change

Occupational and sectoral labor market patterns display a significant overlap. This implies that economic models can explain these patterns to a large degree through either sector- or occupation-specific technological change, but stay silent about the level of specificity. We propose a model where technologies evolve at the sector-occupation level, allowing us to extract sector-only and occupation-only components and to quantify their importance. We find that most of productivity changes are occupation-specific, but that there is also a sizable sector component. We contrast the data and our baseline model against implications of models where technological change is restricted to be either at the sector or at the occupation level, or both. All three restricted models can replicate both sectoral and occupational outcomes very well, but occupation-specific changes are crucial for within-sector changes of occupational employment and income shares