This paper explores the effects of living wages on low-wage workers and low-income families. First, we update our earlier analyses, using data for 1996-2002, and address a number of criticisms of those analyses. We confirm our earlier findings that business assistance living wage laws boost...

Critics of pay or play mandates, borrowing from the large empirical minimum wage literature, provide evidence that they reduce employment. Borrowing from a smaller empirical minimum wage literature, we provide evidence that they also are a blunt instrument for funding health insurance for the...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

Many features of living wage laws may influence the strength of their effects on wages and employment of low-skill individuals. Echoing past research, business assistance living wage laws generate stronger wage increases and employment reductions than contractor-only laws. But broader...

This paper evaluates the effects of the earned income tax credit (EITC) on poor families. Exploiting state-level variation in EITCs, we find that the EITC helps families rise above poverty-level earnings. This occurs by inducing labor market entry in families that initially do not have an adult...

This paper uses confidential Census data, specifically the 1990 and 2000 Census Long Form data, to study the demographic processes underlying the gentrification of low-income urban neighborhoods during the 1990's. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the more refined...

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An...

We estimate the longer-run effects of minimum wages, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare on key economic indicators of economic self-sufficiency in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Our strongest findings are twofold. First, the longer-run effects of the EITC are to increase employment and to...

This paper explores the aggregate economic effects from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which provides up to 100 days of labor to rural laborers at the mandated minimum wage. We examine the within-district change to night-time lights and banking deposits using the...

The primary goal of a national minimum wage floor is to raise the incomes of poor or near-poor families with members in the work force. However, estimates of employment effects of minimum wages tell us little about whether minimum wages are can achieve this goal; even if the disemployment...