Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

In this paper I review what we have learned about living wage laws and their impacts on the wages, employment and poverty rates of low-wage workers. I review the characteristics of these laws and where they have been implemented to date, and what economic theory tells us about their likely...

The empirical literature on occupational licensing finds standard monopoly effects of entry regulations: Less competition and economic rents for professionals. I exploit the natural experimental design of a change in the German crafts regulation in 2004, which removed the traditional licensing...