Can corruption make bureaucracies more efficient?

[Research Highlight]

May 14, 2016

Testing the "efficient grease" hypothesis

Why Raising The Minimum Wage Probably Won't Fix Income Inequality

[News]

March 04, 2016

The Huffington Post covered an AEJ: Applied Economics paper about wage inequality and the minimum wage

Oligopsony and Monopsonistic Competition in Labor Markets

By V. Bhaskar, Alan Manning, and Ted To

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

We argue that models of oligopsony or monopsonistic competition provide insights and explanation for many empirical phenomena in labor markets. Using a simple model with job differentiation and preference heterogeneity, we illustrate how such models can b...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment

By David Neumark and William Wascher

American Economic Review, December 2000

Retrospectives: American Economists in the Progressive Era on the Minimum Wage

By Robert E. Prasch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Beginning in 1912, a number of states passed minimum wage legislation that applied exclusively to women and minors. These tentative experiments in economic legislation ended in 1923 when the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's minimum wage...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply

By David Card and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, December 2000

Minimum Wages and Firm Profitability

By Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We study the impact of minimum wages on firm profitability, exploiting the changes induced by the introduction of a UK national minimum wage in 1999. We use pre-policy information on the distribution of wages to implement a difference-in-differences appro...

Minimum Wage Laws: Are They Overrated?

By Charles Brown

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

I think there is a reasonably high degree of agreement in studies of the impact of the minimum wage on employment, unemployment, and the distribution of income -- though I will also point to a few areas where further work could refine our understanding of...

Relational Knowledge Transfers

By Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

American Economic Review, September 2017

We study how relational contracts mitigate Becker's classic problem of providing general human capital when training contracts are incomplete. The firm's profit-maximizing agreement is a multiperiod apprenticeship in which the novice is trained gradually ...

Minimum Wages and Earnings Inequality in Urban Mexico

By Mariano Bosch and Marco Manacorda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all of the growt...

Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: Fighting Poverty: Lessons from Recent U.S. History

By Rebecca M. Blank

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

Welfare reform efforts in the 1990s aimed at reducing welfare dependence and moving women into work. Public assistance use fell and labor force participation among mothers rose at a stunning rate over the decade. Poverty declined, but at a slower rate. Th...

How Wages Change: Micro Evidence from the International Wage Flexibility Project

By William T. Dickens, Lorenz Goette, Erica L. Groshen, Steinar Holden, Julian Messina, Mark E. Schweitzer, Jarkko Turunen, and Melanie E. Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Workers' wages are not set in a spot market. Instead, the wages of most workers -- at least those who do not switch jobs -- typically change only annually and are mediated by a complex set of institutions and factors such as contracts, unions, standards o...

The Contribution of the Minimum Wage to US Wage Inequality over Three Decades: A Reassessment

By David H. Autor, Alan Manning, and Christopher L. Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2016

We reassess the effect of minimum wages on US earnings inequality using additional decades of data and an IV strategy that addresses potential biases in prior work. We find that the minimum wage reduces inequality in the lower tail of the wage distributio...

Distortions in the International Migrant Labor Market: Evidence from Filipino Migration and Wage Responses to Destination Country Economic Shocks

By David McKenzie, Caroline Theoharides, and Dean Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

We use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to GDP shocks in destination countries. We find a large, significant response of migrant numbers to GDP shocks at d...

Institutional Changes and Rising Wage Inequality: Is There a Linkage?

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Nicole M. Fortin and Thomas Lemieux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

In this paper, the authors analyze the role of three institutional changes--the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, deunionization, and economic deregulation--on the rise in wage inequality in the United States during the 1980s. They argue that...

The Spending and Debt Response to Minimum Wage Hikes

By Daniel Aaronson, Sumit Agarwal, and Eric French

American Economic Review, December 2012

Immediately following a minimum wage hike, household income rises on average by about $250 per quarter and spending by roughly $700 per quarter for households with minimum wage workers. Most of the spending response is caused by a small number of house...

Is a globalized world a less equal world?

[Research Highlight]

May 22, 2018

The relationship between globalization and inequality is not always straightforward.

Job killer or creator?

[Page]

What impact did a $15 per hour minimum wage have on the employment rate in three cities?

Making economics transparent and reproducible

[Research Highlight]

November 14, 2018

The AEA interviews Ted Miguel about the credibility of economics.

Politically risky business

[Research Highlight]

January 30, 2019

How much do close elections affect business investment?