Recent policy debate on minimum wages has focused not only on raising the minimum wage, but on eliminating the tip credit for restaurant workers. We use data on past variation in tip credits - or minimum wages for restaurant workers - to provide evidence on the potential impacts of eliminating...

Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) argue that state-level minimum wage variation correlated with economic shocks generates spurious evidence that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Using minimum wage variation within contiguous county pairs sharing a state border, they find no relationship...

Dube, Lester and Reich (2010, DLR), using state minimum wage discontinuities across bordering counties and Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data, did not detect negative minimum wage effects on restaurant employment. Jha, Neumark and Rodriguez-Lopez (2024, JNR) claim that looking within...

One of the arguments increasingly made to support large minimum wage increases is that they decrease wage or earnings gaps for minorities or women (e.g., Derenoncourt and Montialoux, 2021). The argument is often made with particular reference to higher tipped minimum wages for restaurant...

We constructed a time series of menu prices for the identifiable restaurants at which James Bond dined in France and the UK that yields one of the few international price series representing luxury services. This series enabled us to calculate a real exchange rate based on prices pertinent to...

Economic studies typically underestimate incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations that enhance allocative efficiency and structural dynamics. This paper assesses over 12,000 innovations by female patentees and participants in industrial fairs and prize-granting institutions...

Open banking (OB) empowers bank customers to share transaction data with fintechs and other banks. 49 countries have adopted OB policies. Consumer trust in fintechs predicts OB policy adoption and adoption spurs investment in fintechs. UK microdata shows that OB enables: i) consumers to access...

This paper reports on a small-scale audit study that investigates sex discrimination in restaurant hiring. Comparably matched pairs of men and women applied for jobs as waiters and waitresses at 65 restaurants in Philadelphia. The 130 applications led to 54 interviews and 39 job offers. The...

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

We use a theory of apologies to design a nationwide field experiment involving 1.5 million Uber ridesharing consumers who experienced late rides. Several insights emerge from our field experiment. First, apologies are not a panacea: the efficacy of an apology and whether it may backfire depend...