We assess alternative research designs for minimum wage studies. States in the U.S. with larger minimum wage increases differ from others in business cycle severity, increased inequality and polarization, political economy, and regional distribution. The resulting time-varying heterogeneity...

We use policy discontinuities at state borders to identify the effects of minimum wages on earnings and employment in restaurants and other low-wage sectors. Our approach generalizes the case study method by considering all local differences in minimum wage policies between 1990 and 2006. We...

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...

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...

Why is economic growth so slow and why are we having jobless recoveries? I address these questions here by revisiting Okun’s Law, focusing not just on its cyclical component but also upon its implied estimates of trend growth. Some observers argue that the rising strength of management...