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Newsletter
Employment growth in higher-paying sectors
Working Paper
The effect of school finance reform on population heterogeneity
This paper tests whether state school finance reform alters neighborhood income homogeneity. One implication of the Tiebout model is that within-community homogeneity declines as a result of an exogenous decrease in the ability of jurisdictions to set local tax and expenditure levels. The property tax revolt and the school finance equalization reform of the 1970s and 1980s offer a test of the role of state fiscal reform on aggregate population sorting behavior. The results show that school finance has a significant effect on school district income sorting, especially among low income ...
Newsletter
Explaining Variation in Real Wage Growth Over the Recent Expansion
In August 2019 the unemployment rate was roughly 1 percentage point below the Congressional Budget Office?s (CBO) estimate of its long-run or natural rate, nearly matching the unemployment rate gap that developed during the historically tight labor market of the late 1990s. Nevertheless, real wage growth remains well below its pace of the late 1990s and even that of the milder 2000s expansion.
Working Paper
How do retail prices react to minimum wage increases?
Newsletter
How Much Did the Minimum Wage Drive Real Wage Growth During the Late 2010s?
For much of the recent expansion, real wage growth was surprisingly sluggish, by some measures never reaching its pace prior to the 2008 financial crisis, despite tight labor markets that drove the unemployment rate to 3.5%. However, on average, the lowest-earning workers fared substantially better, consistently experiencing real wage growth of 6% or more for much of the late 2010s, a pace well above the previous two decades.
Newsletter
How does labor adjustment in this recession compare with the past?
The authors examine how firms are adjusting their work force during the current recession in comparison with other recessions over the past 40 years.
Working Paper
Supplier relationships and small business use of trade credit
This paper sheds some light on the empirical importance of supplier relationships, including ethnic ties, for the use of trade credit by minority-owned small businesses. Results based on the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finance (NSSBF) indicate that ethnic differences in the use of trade credit are present after conditioning on an extensive list of control variables. This holds especially for Black-owned businesses, and we find that they use less trade credit, are less likely to take advantage of discounts for early payment, and are more likely to have payments past due. We use ...
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.
Working Paper
Schooling and Political Activism in the Early Civil Rights Era
Does education lead to political engagement? The empirical literature is mixed. Theory suggests economic context matters. Individuals unable to take advantage of education in the labor market are more likely to engage in political activity. We find support for this channel during the rapid expansion of NAACP branches in the South around WWII. Branch growth was stronger where Black workers were denied returns to schooling due to Jim Crow occupational discrimination. We further show that a pre-1931 large-scale school construction program caused greater NAACP activity during the 1940s and 1950s ...