On the November 2004 ballot, citizens of Florida will have the opportunity to vote on a proposal to raise the statewide minimum wage to $6.15 per hour. The measure also calls for tipped workers getting a raise from the current federal mandate of $2.13 to $3.13. The measure includes an automatic...

What are the factors that make for a decent work environment and how do the conditions of work vary in different parts of the United States? To address these and similarly important questions in a clear and accessible way, we have developed a new approach for measuring the work environment on a...

This paper examines the viability of security transaction excise taxes (STETs) as one policy tool for promoting a more stable financial environment, specifically with respect to the U.S. economy. Contrary to a large recent critical literature, we show that a STET can be designed without creating...

Levine & Zervos (1998) presented cross-country econometric evidence showing that, in a sample of 47 countries, stock market liquidity contributed a significant positive influence on GDP growth between 1976-93. We show that the Levine-Zervos results are not robust to alternative specifications...

The idea of an exogenous money supply—controlled entirely through central bank interventions—was a fundamental tenet of monetarism and New Classical economics. Post Keynesians have developed an extensive literature arguing that the money supply is in fact endogenous—that market forces...

This paper presents new non-linear regression estimates of the relationship between inflation and economic growth for 80 countries over the period 1961 – 2000. We perform tests using the full sample of countries as well as sub-samples consisting of OECD countries, middle-income countries, and...

The U.S. economy faces enormous questions and challenges as it attempts to recover from the col-lapse of 2008-09. Some of the most pressing questions are a series of longer-term, structural chal-lenges: Can we establish a growth engine driven by something other than financial bubbles? Can we...

Drawing on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), David Neumark (2002) finds that living wage laws have brought substantial wage increases for a high proportion of workers in cities that have passed these laws. He also finds that living wage laws significantly reduce employment...

In a new study by Yelowitz “Santa Fe’s Wage Ordinance and the Labor Market,” dated September 23, 2005 (published by the Employment Policies Institute) Yelowitz claims to have demonstrated that the Santa Fe living wage ordinance is responsible for significant, negative consequences for...