Is the expansion of jobs in low-wage services in Europe restricted by high wages? With services now the main sector source of employment growth this question becomes crucial and we examine it through a detailed comparison of the role of low-wage services in the US and Germany. We find a clear...

We present a new approach to estimating minimum wage effects on employment. In contrast to most previous research, we account for the possibility that the relationship between minimum wages and employment depends on the magnitude of the minimum wage relative to the equilibrium wage in the...

After nearly a decade without change, legislation that affected the Federal minimum wage in two significant ways took effect on April 1, 1990: (1) the hourly minimum wage was increased from $3.35 to $3.80; and (2) employers were enabled to pay a subminimum wage to teenage workers for up to six...

This paper analyzes economic behavior and the effects of training and income support policies in the low wage labor market for women. The opportunity set takes account of nonlinearities and discontinuities associated with career interruption, part-time work, and government programs. There are...

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. To implement our approach, we estimate the effect of the minimum wage on the...

We examine the implications of persistent low real interest rates and wage growth rates on individuals nearing retirement. We begin by reviewing the concept of r star - the long-term real, safe interest rate that is neither expansionary nor contractionary - and presenting recent estimates...

Prices are typically used as proxies for countries' export quality. I relax this strong assumption by exploiting both price and quantity information to estimate the quality of products exported to the U.S. Higher quality is assigned to products with higher market shares conditional on price. The...

The model predicts a near doubling of the ratio of high- to low-skilled wages over the century. Increasing wage inequality arises from a traditional source -- a rising worldwide relative supply of unskilled labor, reflecting Chinese and Indian productivity improvements. But China's and India's...

Data on consumption inequality are too fragile to reach firm conclusions. We introduce two new issues, disparities in the growth of price indexes and also of life expectancy between the rich and the poor. We conclude with a perspective on international differences that blends institutional and...

Whereas there is widespread belief that workers in temporary help services (THS) are subject to poorer working conditions, in particular pay, than comparable workers in the rest of the economy, there is little evidence on whether that is driven by the sector per se or by the workers'...