Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:J30 

Working Paper
Minimum Wage Increases and Vacancies

Using a unique data set and a novel identification strategy, we estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on job vacancy postings. Using occupation-specific county-level vacancy data from the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online for 2005-2018, we find that state-level minimum wage increases lead to substantial declines in existing and new vacancy postings in occupations with a larger share of workers who earn close to the prevailing minimum wage. We estimate that a 10 percent increase in the state-level effective minimum wage reduces vacancies by 2.4 percent in the same quarter, and ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2022-10

Working Paper
Earnings Business Cycles: The Covid Recession, Recovery, and Policy Response

Using a panel of tax data, we follow the earnings of individuals over business cycles. Compared to prior recessions, the Covid policy response and recovery were far more progressive. Among workers starting in the bottom quintile, median real earnings including fiscal relief increased 66 percent in 2020 and earnings increases offset relief decreases in the 2021 recovery. After the prior two recessions, this measure had decreased by 24 percent. Among those starting in the top quintile, median and average real earnings were approximately unchanged. This difference from prior recessions is ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2023-004

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 Series , Paper WP-2013-26

Working Paper
Minimum Wage Increases and Vacancies

Using a unique data set and a novel identification strategy, we estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on job vacancy postings. Utilizing occupation-specific county level vacancy data from the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online for 2005-2018, we find that state-level minimum wage increases lead to substantial declines in existing and new vacancy postings in occupations with a larger share of workers who earn close to the prevailing minimum wage. We estimate that a 10 percent increase in the state level effective minimum wage reduces vacancies by 2.4 percent in the same quarter, ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-30R

Working Paper
Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle

We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties. Consequently, individuals’ time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle. This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape. We present evidence that the move towards ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2025-01

Journal Article
Wage Leaders and Laggards: Decomposing the Growth in Average Hourly Earnings

Wage growth has accelerated gradually over the past two years, largely due to a pickup in wage growth in a few industries ? the wage leaders. {{p}} Another, larger group of industries ? the wage laggards ? has not contributed at all to the acceleration. But the wage laggards have seen relatively strong growth in hours worked over the past two years, indicating rising labor demand that could lead to a further acceleration in overall wage growth.
Macro Bulletin

Working Paper
Endogenous Bargaining Power and Declining Labor Compensation Share

We document that the protracted decline in the labor share has been accompanied by a decline in the tightness rate defined as the number of vacancies per job seekers. We argue that these two trends are related. When vacancies and job seekers are complements in the matching process, a decline in the tightness rate reduces workers’ fundamental bargaining power as defined by Hosios (1990), which in turn reduces the labor share of income. We calibrate a search and matching model extended to allow for an endogenous determination of bargaining power. The model can rationalize the common trends in ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 092

Working Paper
Pay, Employment, and Dynamics of Young Firms

Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for relevant dimensions of worker and firm heterogeneity, we uncover a positive and significant young-firm pay premium. Furthermore, we show that worker selection at firm birth is related to future firm dynamics, including survival and growth. We tie our empirical findings to a simple model of pay, employment, ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 21

Working Paper
The Quality-Adjusted Cyclical Price of Labor

Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate cyclicality in labor’s user cost exploiting the longrun wage in a match to control for match quality. Using NLSY data for 1980 to 2019, we identify three channels by which hiring in a recession affects user cost: It lowers the new-hire wage; it lowers wages going forward in the match; but it also ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2023-10

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

Larrimore, Jeff 10 items

Kudlyak, Marianna 8 items

Corinth, Kevin C. 6 items

Mortenson, Jacob 4 items

Splinter, David 4 items

Tuzemen, Didem 4 items

show more (109)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

E24 28 items

D31 10 items

J63 10 items

J64 9 items

E32 7 items

show more (74)

FILTER BY Keywords

Wages 10 items

Labor share 6 items

Full income 5 items

Generations 5 items

Growth 5 items

Millennials 5 items

show more (142)

PREVIOUS / NEXT