Using data from three waves of Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult's (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests demonstrate that this result...

This paper assesses the impact of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) on employment and inequality in the UK over the decade since its introduction in 1999. Identification is facilitated by using variation in the bite of the NMW across local labour markets and the different sized year on year up...

We estimate the effects of labor market entry conditions on wages for male individuals first entering the Austrian labor market between 1978 and 2000. We find a large negative effect of unfavorable entry conditions on starting wages as well as a sizeable negative long-run effect. Specifically,...

Worksharing is considered by many as a promising public policy to reduce unemployment. In this paper we present a review of the most pertinent theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on worksharing. In addition, we also provide new empirical evidence on this issue, by a cross...

As recent efforts to reform immigration policy at the federal level have failed, states have started to take immigration matters into their own hands and researchers have been paying closer attention to state dynamics surrounding immigration policy. Yet, to this date, there is not a clear...

A striking feature of the past few decades has been the development of wage-determination models that assume that labour markets are imperfectly competitive. This paper discusses two such models (trade unions and oligopsony), although there are many more. It also asks if imperfectly competitive...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms' job offer and workers' job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show that...

Do apparently large minimum wage increases in an environment of recession produce clearer evidence of disemployment effects than is typically observed in the new minimum wage literature? This paper augments the sparse literature on the most recent increases in the U.S. minimum wage, using three...

In this paper we survey the recent empirical literature on the effects of offshoring on wage, employment and displacement. We start with an overview of the measurement of offshoring, organizing our discussion around the three key elements of offshoring: that it involves intermediate inputs for...

The depth of the Great Recession, the slow recovery of job creation, the downward trend in labor force participation, high long-term unemployment, stagnant or declining wages for low-to-medium skill jobs owing to adverse labor demand shifts, and a greater rebound in low-wage than mid- or...