We estimate the employment effects of changes in national minimum wages using a pooled cross-section time-series data set comprising 17 OECD countries for the period 1975-2000, focusing on the impact of cross-country differences in minimum wage systems and in other labor market institutions and...

A high minimum wage (relative to average wages) raises nominal wage growth and hence inflation. This effect can be offset by extra unemployment; so the minimum wage increases the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment or NAIRU. This effect is clearly discernible and robust to variations...

In earlier work, we presented results suggesting that minimum wage increases have important consequences for both the employment opportunities of youths and their decision to enroll in school. In this paper, we show that the recent claim made by William Evans and Mark Turner that our results are...

We reassess the effect of state and federal minimum wages on U.S. earnings inequality, attending to two issues that appear to bias earlier work: violation of the assumed independence of state wage levels and state wage dispersion, and errors-in-variables that inflate impact estimates via an...

This paper uses a panel of state-level data to test whether changes in bank loan supply affect output. Since the U.S. states are small open economies with fixed exchange rates, state-specific shocks to money demand are automatically accommodated, leading to changes in lending if banks rely on...

This paper examines whether the average level of human capital in a region affects the earnings of an individual residing in that region in a manner that is external to the individual's own human capital. I find little evidence of an external effect of human capital, which suggests that human...