More competing. More saving.

[Research Highlight]

February 21, 2019

How do national retailers set prices? And who does it help?

Barron's features AER paper on minimum wage

[News]

August 28, 2019

Research from Hungary finds minimal job losses from raising the pay floor.

Passing the buck

[Research Highlight]

July 25, 2019

Who pays for a raise in the minimum wage and how does it affect job growth?

Fighting poverty with a living wage

[Page]

How much would raising the minimum wage increase family incomes?

2019 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 16, 2019

Economists tackled populism, minimum wages, censorship, and more.

Kenneth McLaughlin on the effect of minimum wage hikes on the workforce

[Page]

How does increasing the pay floor affect employment for teens and dropouts?

Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?

By Peter Harasztosi and Attila Lindner

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around...

Minimum Wages, Morality, and Efficiency: A Choice Experiment

By Conor Lennon, Jose Fernandez, Stephan Gohmann, and Keith Teltser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use a choice experiment to examine public support for minimum wages. We first elicit respondents' moral assessment of two labor market systems: one with a minimum wage and one without. Then, we present four pairs of hypothetical employment outcomes and...

In Search of Labor Demand

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben M. Sand

American Economic Review, September 2018

We propose and estimate a novel specification of labor demand which encompasses search frictions and the role of entrepreneurs in new firm creation. Using city-industry variation over four decades, we estimate the wage elasticity of employment demand to b...

Solo Self-Employment and Alternative Work Arrangements: A Cross-Country Perspective on the Changing Composition of Jobs

By Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan B. Krueger, and Stephen Machin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements....

Identification of and Correction for Publication Bias

By Isaiah Andrews and Maximilian Kasy

American Economic Review, August 2019

Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. We propose two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study's re...

Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes

By Arindrajit Dube

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

There is robust evidence that higher minimum wages increase family incomes at the bottom of the distribution. The long-run (3 or more years) minimum wage elasticity of the non-elderly poverty rate with respect to the minimum wage ranges between −0.220 a...

"An ambassador of the economics profession"

[Research Highlight]

March 31, 2020

Gregory Mankiw reflects on three decades as a textbook author.

Explaining the Decline in the US Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence

By Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2018. Population aging has had...

The Elusive Employment Effect of the Minimum Wage

[Symposium: Minimum Wage]

By Alan Manning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2021

It is hard to find a negative effect on the employment effect of rises in the minimum wage: the elusive employment effect. It is much easier to find an impact on wages. This paper argues the elusive employment effect is unlikely to be solved by better dat...

How Do Firms Respond to Minimum Wage Increases? Understanding the Relevance of Non-employment Margins

[Symposium: Minimum Wage]

By Jeffrey Clemens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2021

This paper discusses non-employment margins through which firms may respond to minimum wage increases.  Margins of interest include evasion, output prices, noncash compensation, job attributes including effort requirements, the firm’s mix of low- and h...

The Rise of American Minimum Wages, 1912–1968

[Symposium: Minimum Wage]

By Price V. Fishback and Andrew J. Seltzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2021

This paper studies the judicial, political, and intellectual battles over minimum wages from the early state laws of the 1910s through the peak in the real federal minimum in 1968. Early laws were limited to women and children and were ruled unconstitutio...

City Limits: What Do Local-Area Minimum Wages Do?

[Symposium: Minimum Wage]

By Arindrajit Dube and Attila Lindner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2021

Cities are increasingly setting their own minimum wages, and this trend has accelerated sharply in recent years. While in 2010 there were only three cities with their own minimum wages exceeding the state or federal standard, by 2020 there were 42. This n...

Well-being and poverty

[Research Highlight]

May 11, 2021

There are important considerations beyond incentives to work more.

Making economic tools more reliable

[Research Highlight]

June 08, 2021

An interview with Isaiah Andrews, the 2021 John Bates Clark Medalist