Search Results
Journal Article
The decline in teen labor force participation
The authors examine the recent decline in teen work activity, offering explanations for both the long secular decline since the late 1970s and the recent acceleration in this decline since 2000. They argue that much of this pattern is due to a significant increase in the rewards to formal education. They also explore the importance of changes to labor demand, crowding out by substitutable workers, the increased work activity of mothers, and increases in wealth.
Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and the Minimum Wage: A Putty-Clay Approach
We document two new facts about the market-level response to minimum wage hikes: firm exit and entry both rise. These results pose a puzzle: canonical models of firm dynamics predict that exit rises but that entry falls. We develop a model of firm dynamics based on putty-clay technology and show that it is consistent with the increase in both exit and entry. The putty-clay model is also consistent with the small short-run employment effects of minimum wage hikes commonly found in empirical work. However, unlike monopsony-based explanations for small short-run employment effects, the model ...
Working Paper
The minimum wage and restaurant prices
Using both store-level and aggregated price data from the food away from home component of the Consumer Price Index survey, we show that restaurant prices rise in response to an increase in the minimum wage. These results hold up when using several different sources of variation in the data. We interpret these findings within a model of employment determination. The model implies that minimum wage hikes cause employment to fall and prices to rise if labor markets are competitive but potentially cause employment to rise and prices to fall if labor markets are monopsonistic. Therefore, our ...
Journal Article
Assessing the jobless recovery
This article reviews trends in employment growth during the recent recovery, including new evidence that much of the increase in self-employment since the beginning of the recession is likely a reflection of the weak labor market conditions of the last three years. The authors also offer thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of several explanations for the disappointing employment growth of the last few years.
Working Paper
Teachers and student achievement in the Chicago public high schools
We match administrative data on Chicago public high school students and teachers at the classroom level to estimate the importance of teachers to mathematics test score gains. We show that sampling variation and other measurement issues are important drivers of nave estimates of teacher effects, in some cases accounting for the majority of dispersion in teacher quality. However, correcting for these problems, teachers are still economically and statistically influential. Replacing a teacher with another that is rated two standard deviations superior in quality can add 0.35 to 0.45 grade ...
Potential Jobs Impacted by Covid-19: An Update
This blog post updates our earlier analysis of the potential jobs impacted by Covid-19. The update reflects three adjustments to the original analysis. First, we updated our guesses on the shares of each industry employed and working at still-operating businesses based on the Labor Department’s March Employment Situation report. Second, we use an updated model to estimate the possible June unemployment rates from initial unemployment insurance claims data (the model details are found here. Finally, we use unemployment rate predictions that incorporate the data from the April 2 report on ...
Working Paper
The consumption response to minimum wage increases
This paper presents evidence that spending increases more than income, and thus debt rises, in households with minimum wage workers following a minimum wage hike. Furthermore, we show that the size, timing, persistence, and composition of spending is inconsistent with the basic certainty equivalent life cycle model. However, our findings are consistent with a model where households can borrow against part of the value of their durable goods. ; Preliminary and incomplete.
Journal Article
Unemployment and wage growth: recent cross-state evidence
This article shows that even in recent years there is a relatively robust, negative cross-state correlation between appropriate measures of unemployment and wage growth.
Newsletter
Regional growth in worker quality
Newsletter
Understanding the Relationship between Real Wage Growth and Labor Market Conditions
The authors find that the share of the labor force that is medium-term unemployed (five to 26 weeks unemployed) and the share working part time (less than 35 hours per week) involuntarily are strongly correlated with real wage growth. Moreover, they estimate that average real wage growth would have been between one-half of a percentage point and a full percentage point higher in June 2014 if 2005?07 labor market conditions had been restored, indicating that the slack in the jobs market still weighs heavily on the real wage prospects of U.S. workers.