Establishing a $15 minimum wage at U.S. airports will provide transformative economic benefits for low-paid air transportation employees who work 24-7 in a fast-paced, noisy environment, providing essential services for airlines and the traveling public. Flying Right analyzes current wage and...

Work complexity can be an important factor contributing to the observed employment and wage developments. Using German data, we find that it increased substantially between 1986 and 2012. Work complexity was higher for high-educated employees in the past but differences have leveled out in 2012...

Using monthly data from major U.S. metropolitan areas that span state borders, we estimate the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage using a difference-in-differences design with continuous treatment in two-digit industries of 71 (Arts, Entertainment and Recreation) and 72...

Using population-wide Swedish register data on cognitive abilities and productive personality traits, we show that employment growth has been monotonically skill-biased in terms of these general-purpose intellectual skills, despite a simultaneous (polarizing) decline in middle-wage jobs....

Three fundamental forces have shaped labor markets over the last 50 years: the secular increase in the returns to education, educational upgrading, and the integration of large numbers of women into the workforce. We modify the Katz and Murphy (1992) framework to predict the structure of the...

According to federal law in 2013, employers can take a credit of up to $5.13 for tips received by workers in satisfying the minimum wage requirement of $7.25. This study uses interstate variation in laws regarding tip credits and minimum wages to identify the effects of reducing or eliminating...

Most of the rise in overall earnings inequality is accounted for by rising between-industry dispersion from about ten percent of 4-digit NAICS industries. These thirty industries are in the tails of the earnings distribution, and are clustered especially in high-paying high-tech and low-paying...

Starting in the 1980s, the composition of immigrants to the U.S. shifted towards less-skilled workers partly due to the influx of Latin American immigrants in the past few decades. Around this time, real wages and employment of younger and less-educated U.S. workers fell. Some believe that...

This article offers the first empirical evidence that labor force exit rates rise when workers’ relative earnings fall. The model takes into account that a job not only provides economic security but also affirms a worker’s social status, which is tied to their relative position in the labor...

Since the spring of 2021, over 33 million Americans have departed their employment, according to the popular slogan. The majority of Americans who left their employment appear to be doing so to acquire better jobs. The highest percentage of leaving is among low-wage workers in the leisure and...