Conventional approaches to estimating the effect of minimum wages on teen employment insufficiently account for heterogeneous employment patterns and selectivity of states with higher minimum wages. We overcome this problem by using policy discontinuities at state borders. Our estimates from...

Outsourcing of labor services grew substantially during the eighties and nineties, and was associated with lower wages, less benefits, and lower rates of unionization. We focus on two occupations for which we can identify outsourcing using industry and occupation codes: janitors and guards....

This paper estimates the effect of Wal-Mart expansion on wages, benefits, and skill-composition of retail workers during the 1990s. We exploit the spatial pattern of Wal-Mart diffusion, radiating outward from the original store in Benton county, Arkansas, to control for potential endogeneity in...

We investigate properties of employee replacement costs, using a panel survey of California businesses in 2003 and 2008. We establish that replacement costs are substantial relative to annual wages and that they are associated negatively with the use of seniority in promotion. We also find some...

In 2006 San Francisco adopted major health reform, becoming the first city to implement a pay-or-play employer-health spending mandate. It also created Healthy San Francisco, a "public option" to promote affordable universal access to care. Using the 2008 Bay Area Employer Health Benefits...

We provide the first estimates of the effects of minimum wages on employment flows in the U.S. labor market, identifying the impact using policy discontinuities at state borders. We find that minimum wages have a sizable negative effect on employment flows but not stocks: separations and...

We measure labor market frictions using a strategy that bridges design-based and structural approaches: estimating an equilibrium search model using reduced-form minimum wage elasticities identified from border discontinuities and fitted with Bayesian and LIML methods. We begin by providing the...

We provide the first estimates of the effects of minimum wages on employment flows in the U.S. labor market, identifying the impact by using policy discontinuities at state borders. We find that minimum wages have  sizeable negative effect on employment flows but not stocks. Separations and...

This paper presents the first study of the economic effects of a citywide minimum wage— San Francisco’s adoption of a minimum wage, set at $8.50 in 2004 and $9.14 by 2007. Compared to earlier benchmark studies by Card and Krueger and by Neumark and Wascher, this study surveys...

Traditional estimates of minimum wage effects include controls for state unemployment rates and state and year fixed-effects. Using CPS data on teens for the period 1990 – 2009, we show that such estimates fail to account for heterogeneous employment patterns that are correlated with...