In the wake of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA), we introduce and study two new data sources to estimate the extent to which school-to-work programs have been implemented in U.S. high schools, and the extent to which high school students are participating in these programs. The...

A critical impediment to research on school-to-work programs has been the absence of large representative data sets with information on such programs. In contrast, the new NLSY (NLSY97) offers researchers opportunities to analyze direct evidence on school-to-work programs. In the NLSY97,...

Many cities in the United States have recently passed living wage ordinances. These ordinances typically mandate that businesses under contract with the city or, in some cases, receiving assistance from the city, must pay their workers a wage sufficient to support a family financially. To date,...

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 provides evidence on a wide set of margins along which labor markets can adjust in response to increases in the minimum wage, including wages, hours, employment, and ultimately labor income, representing the central margins of adjustment that impact the economic well-being of workers...

I synthesize and summarize a set of recent papers on changes in the employment relationship. The authors of these papers present the most up-to-date and accurate assessment of their evidence on changes in job stability and job security, and attempt to reconcile their evidence with the findings...

Interest in the potential effects of different systems for organizing work and managing employees on the performance of organizations has a long history in the social sciences. The interest in economics, arguably more recent, reflects a general concern about the sources of competitiveness in...

Although the debate over Affirmative Action is both high-profile and high-intensity, neither side's position is based on a well-established set of research findings. Economics provides an extensive, well-known literature on which to draw regarding the existence and extent of labor market...

We estimate the employment effects of changes in national minimum wages using a pooled cross-section time-series data set comprising sixteen OECD countries for the period 1975-1997. We pay particular attention to the impact of cross-country differences in minimum wage systems and in other labor...

This paper presents evidence on the employment effects of recent minimum wage increases from a pre-specified research design that entailed committing to a detailed set of statistical analyses prior to 'going to' the data. Despite the limited data to which the pre-specified research design can be...