Over the past decade, organized labor has played a significant role in advocating for minimum wage increases. In this paper, we investigate the effects of minimum wage increases on union membership among individuals in minimum wage intensive industries. Consistent with a "freeriding" hypothesis,...

We develop new facts relating news coverage, interest groups, and events in the legislative histories of minimum wage increases. First, we create and validate a database of news articles that includes coverage of minimum wages and organized labor. Second, we show that policy changes predict...

Over the past decade, organized labor has played a significant role in advocating for minimum wage increases. Why might this be, given that the minimum wage may act as a substitute for the bargaining power offered by labor unions? In this paper, we study the interplay between minimum wages and...

We investigate the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions (ZVS) in medicine and related subjects. This mechanism consists of three procedures based on final grades from school ("Abiturbestenverfahren", "Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen") and on...

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central...

Using the DYMIMIC approach, estimates of the shadow economy in 145 developing, transition, developed OECD countries, South Pacific islands and still communist countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 2002/2003 in developing countries is...

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries’ institutional quality affect the shadow economy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level and changes of...

We exploit a natural experiment based on the Italian promotion system for associate and full professor positions to investigate gender differences in the willingness to enter competition. Using data on about 42,000 professors and controlling for productivity and a number of individual and field...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the...