We assess a prominent argument for local economic policies that favor locally-owned businesses - namely, that locally-owned firms are more likely to internalize the costs to the community of decisions to reduce employment and hence help to insulate cities from adverse economic shocks. We test...

We revisit the minimum wage-employment debate, which is as old as the Department of Labor. In particular, we assess new studies claiming that the standard panel data approach used in much of the "new minimum wage research" is flawed because it fails to account for spatial heterogeneity. These...

We provide updated evidence on the effects of living wage laws in U.S. cities, relative to the earlier research covering only the first six or seven years of existence of these laws. There are some challenges to updating the evidence, as the CPS data on which it relies changed geographic coding...

We analyze and assess new evidence on employment dynamics from a new data source the National Establishment Time Series (NETS). The NETS offers advantages over existing data sources for studying employment dynamics, including tracking business establishment relocations that can contribute to job...

Barriers to outsourcing that are being currently implemented in the US effectively tax its companies who "export" jobs through outsourcing. The objective is to raise domestic employment. Given that many of the important international markets where the US has a comparative advantage feature...

I discuss the econometrics and the economics of past research on the effects of minimum wages on employment in the United States. My intent is to try to identify key questions raised in the recent literature, and some from the earlier literature, which I think hold the most promise for...

Many U.S. cities have recently increased their minimum wages, especially in California. We report results from carrying out analyses of the impacts of these city minimum wages, as specified in a pre-analysis plan (PAP) that was registered on Open Science Framework prior to the release of data...