A note on the benefits of homeownership

This brief note adds to recent work that attempts to identify externalities associated with homeownership. The results suggest that some of the homeownership effect found in Green and White [5] is driven by family characteristics associated with homeownership, especially residential stability. However, as much as homeownership increases residential stability, it appears to be correlated with higher school attainment. Attempts to control for endogeneity cannot eliminate this finding. ; Originally issued as WP 98-20 (June 1999)

Price pass-through and minimum wages

A textbook consequence of competitive markets is that an industry-wide increase in the price of inputs will be passed on to consumers through an increase in prices. This fundamental implication has been explored by researchers interested in who bears the burden of taxation and exchange rate fluctuations. However, little attention has focused on the price implications of minimum wage hikes. From a policy perspective, this is an oversight. Welfare analysis of minimum wage laws should not ignore consumers. Furthermore, estimates of price shifting can have important implications for wage-push inflation stories, as well as potentially provide an explanation for the small short-run employment effects that have been found in some of the minimum wage literature. Finally, for purposes of monetary policy, it is critical to isolate one-time price increases from longer term trends. ; This paper uses three data sources on restaurant prices to examine the impact of minimum wage hikes in Canada and the U.S. Particular attention is paid to the timing of these price changes and their overall impact relative to full or competitive price pass-through predictions. The results suggest that restaurant prices rise roughly one-for-one with increases in the wage bill that result from minimum wage legislation. Furthermore, the price responses are concentrated in the quarter surrounding the month that the legislation is enacted. Although minimum wage legislation is typically enacted many months in advance, there is no price response leading up to the hike and little adjustment in the months subsequent to the hike, excepting the few months around the enactment date. If anything, there is some evidence that minimum wage price effects dissipate over time. The magnitude of these findings is roughly the same in the U.S. and Canada, and is fairly robust to changes in data, specification, and estimation techniques. However, because of small predicted elasticities, it is difficult to draw inferences about the price impact on broader indices or industries that have a small share of low wage labor.Wages ; Labor market

Recent evidence on the relationship between unemployment and wage growth

The current expansion has delivered the lowest unemployment rates in decades, yet nominal wage growth has remained relatively contained. This suggests to some a shift in the historical relationship between unemployment and wage growth. We look across the states for more timely evidence of a change in this relationship. We find some evidence that the elasticity of real wage growth with respect to unemployment has fallen recently, a result that is not due to a compositional shift toward college-educated workers. However, evidence of a weakened relationship is itself weak, depending on inherently arbitrary decisions about when a shift may have occurred. In addition, we find that levels of real wage growth associated with high, medium, and low unemployment have remained relatively constant.Unemployment ; Wages ; Prices

Growth in worker quality

Labor productivity ; Human capital

Regional growth in worker quality

Labor productivity ; Human capital

Cross-state evidence on the relationship between unemployment and wage growth

Unemployment ; Wages

Unemployment and wage growth: recent cross-state evidence

This article shows that even in recent years there is a relatively robust, negative cross-state correlation between appropriate measures of unemployment and wage growth.Unemployment ; Wages

Recent trends in job displacement

Displaced workers ; Job security ; Unemployment

The decline of job security in the 1990s: displacement, anxiety, and their effect on wage growth

This article shows that job displacement rates for high-seniority workers and a consistently constructed measure of workers' fears of job loss both rose during the 1990s. It then explores the relationship between these measures of job displacement and worker anxiety and wage growth.Job security ; Downsizing of organizations ; Wages

BosonSampling with Lost Photons

BosonSampling is an intermediate model of quantum computation where linear-optical networks are used to solve sampling problems expected to be hard for classical computers. Since these devices are not expected to be universal for quantum computation, it remains an open question of whether any error-correction techniques can be applied to them, and thus it is important to investigate how robust the model is under natural experimental imperfections, such as losses and imperfect control of parameters. Here we investigate the complexity of BosonSampling under photon losses---more specifically, the case where an unknown subset of the photons are randomly lost at the sources. We show that, if $k$ out of $n$ photons are lost, then we cannot sample classically from a distribution that is $1/n^{\Theta(k)}$-close (in total variation distance) to the ideal distribution, unless a $\text{BPP}^{\text{NP}}$ machine can estimate the permanents of Gaussian matrices in $n^{O(k)}$ time. In particular, if $k$ is constant, this implies that simulating lossy BosonSampling is hard for a classical computer, under exactly the same complexity assumption used for the original lossless case.Comment: 12 pages. v2: extended concluding sectio