We assess the evidence on the contribution of changes in the population age structure to the changing fortunes of youths in labor markets in advanced economies over the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and use this evidence to project the likely effects of future cohort sizes on youth labor...

We construct a panel data set on state-level minimum wage laws and economic conditions to reevaluate existing evidence on minimum wage effects on employment, most of which comes from time-series data. Our estimates of the elasticities of teen and young-adult employment-to-population ratios fall...

In Neumark and Wascher (1992), we present findings supporting the earlier consensus that minimum wages reduce employment for teens and young adults, with elasticities in the range -0.1 to -0.2. In addition, we find that subminimum wages moderate these disemployment effects. Card, Katz and...

The need for school-to-work programs or other means of increasing early job market stability is predicated on the view that the chaotic' nature of youth labor markets in the U.S. is costly because workers drift from one job to another without developing skills, behavior, or other characteristics...

A central issue in estimating the employment effects of minimum wages is the appropriate comparison group for states (or other regions) that adopt or increase the minimum wage. In recent research, Dube et al. (2010) and Allegretto et al. (2011) argue that past U.S. research is flawed because it...

We estimate the employment effects of changes in national minimum wages using a pooled cross-section time-series data set comprising sixteen OECD countries for the period 1975-1997. We pay particular attention to the impact of cross-country differences in minimum wage systems and in other labor...

The recent debate over minimum wages raises two questions. First, should policy makers no longer believe that minimum wages entail negative consequences for teenagers? Second, should economists discard the competitive labor market model? Our evidence for teenagers, using matched CPS surveys,...

In the wake of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA), we introduce and study two new data sources to estimate the extent to which school-to-work programs have been implemented in U.S. high schools, and the extent to which high school students are participating in these programs. The...

We contrast the spatial mismatch hypothesis with what we term the racial mismatch hypothesis - that the problem is not a lack of jobs, per se, where blacks live, but a lack of jobs where blacks live into which blacks are hired. We first report new evidence on the spatial mismatch hypothesis,...