The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct...

We estimate the minimum wage's effects on low-skilled workers' employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not....

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical...

We reassess the effect of state and federal minimum wages on U.S. earnings inequality using two additional decades of data and far greater variation in minimum wages than was available to earlier studies. We argue that prior literature suffers from two sources of bias and propose an IV strategy...

Occupational licensing is among the fastest-growing labor market institutions in the U.S. economy. One of the key features of occupational licensing is that the law determines who gets to do the work. In those cases where universally licensed occupations are both complements to and substitutes...

This paper compares changes in the structure of wages in France, Great Britain, Japan. and the United States over the last twenty years. Wage differentials by education and occupation (skill differentials) narrowed substantially in all four countries in the 1970s. Overall wage inequality and...

We estimate the post-release economic effects of participation in prison-based General Educational Development (GED) programs using a panel of earnings records and a rich set of individual information from administrative data in the state of Florida. Fixed effects estimates of the impact of...

I estimate the relative magnitudes of worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. Institutional features imply that voluntary turnover dominates switching in the market for Swedish engineers from 1970--1990. I use data on...

Rising wage inequality within-gender since 1975 has created the illusion of rising wage equality between genders. In the 1970's, women were relatively equal (to each other) in terms of their earnings potential, so that nonwage factors may have dominated female labor supply decisions and...

Despite indications that people skills are important for understanding individual labor-market outcomes and have become more important over the last decades, there is little analysis by economists. This paper shows that people skills are important determinants of labor-market outcomes, including...