Living wage ordinances typically mandate that businesses under contract with a city or, in some cases, receiving assistance from a city, must pay their workers a wage sufficient to support a family financially. We estimate the effects of these ordinances on wages, hours, and employment in cities...

An oft-stated goal of the minimum wage is to raise incomes of poor or low-income families. We present nonparametric estimates of the effects of minimum wages on the distribution of family income relative to needs in the United States. Although minimum wages increase the incomes of some poor...

Exposure to minimum wages at young ages could lead to adverse longer-run effects via decreased labor market experience and tenure, and diminished education and training, while beneficial longer-run effects could arise if minimum wages increase skill acquisition. Evidence suggests that as...

This paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males. Longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage, and that cross-sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile. Data from a company personnel file...

We explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross-sectional relationships between marriage, motherhood, and wages. We find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the "direct" effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and tenure);...

This paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups, introduced by Oaxaca (1973), to a theoretical model of employers' discriminatory behavior. It is shown that, conditional on different assumptions about employers' discriminatory tastes, Oaxaca's...

This paper explores the consequences of age discrimination in the work-place by analyzing self-reports of discrimination in the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men, for the period 1966-80. Workers with positive reports were much more likely to separate from their employer and less likely...

One potential method to increase the success of female graduate students in economics is to encourage mentoring relationships between these students and female faculty members, via increased hiring of female faculty, or having female faculty serve as dissertation chairs for female students. This...

The human capital explanation of sex differences in wages is that, owing to specialization in household production, women intend to work in the labor market more intermittently than men, and therefore invest less, leading to lower wage growth. An alternative "feedback" hypothesis is that women...

We report new evidence on the existence of sex discrimination in wages and whether competitive market forces reduce or eliminate discrimination, based on plant- and firm-level data on profitability, growth and ownership changes, product market power, and workforce sex composition. Our strongest...