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Working Paper
Do Minimum Wages Really Increase Youth Drinking and Drunk Driving?
Adams, Blackburn, and Cotti (ABC) found that increases in minimum wages were positively related to drunk driving?related traffic fatalities for those ages 16 to 20. The hypothesized mechanism for this relationship?increased alcohol consumption caused by minimum wage?induced income gains?remains empirically unexplored. Using data from two national behavioral surveys and an identification strategy identical to ABC, we find little evidence that an increase in the minimum wage leads to increases in alcohol consumption or drunk driving among teenagers. These results suggest a much smaller set of ...
Working Paper
Measuring Overtime Exemption Status: A Task-Based Approach
This paper introduces new measures of the overtime exemption status of individual tasks measured by O*NET. Task-based measures reveal that about 60 percent of salaried workers are in occupations in which either all or no O*NET tasks are exempt. While workers with higher earnings tend to be employed in occupations in which a larger share of tasks are exempt, there is substantial variation in exempt task shares across occupations at all levels of earnings. The task content of job ads shows a similar pattern. Incorporating task-based exemption measures into extensions of prior work reveals that ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Minimum Wages on Consumer Bankruptcy
We use cross-state differences in minimum wage (MW) levels and county-level consumer bankruptcy rates from 1991-2017 to estimate the effect of changes in minimum wages on consumer bankruptcy by exploiting policy discontinuities at state borders. We find that Chapter 7 bankruptcy rates are significantly lower in counties belonging to states with higher MW compared to neighboring counties in the lower MW state: a 10 percent increase in MW decreases the bankruptcy rate by around 4 percent. Before the 2005 bankruptcy reform, this effect was almost twice as large as for the entire sample. ...
Working Paper
Explaining Stagnation in the College Wage Premium
After growing substantially during the 1980s through the early 2000s, the college wage premium more recently has been largely unchanged, or stagnant. We extend the canonical production-function model of skill premiums to assess supply and demand contributions to the slowdown in college wage premium, using annual CPS ASEC data from the early 1960s through 2023. To account for the rising importance of women in the college educated workforce, we estimate a hybrid model that incorporates components that are disaggregated by age and gender. We also allow for non-linearities and changes over time ...
Working Paper
Minimum Wages and Consumer Credit : Impacts on Access to Credit and Traditional and High-Cost Borrowing
Proponents of minimum wage legislation point to its potential to raise earnings and reduce poverty, while opponents argue that disemployment effects lead to net welfare losses. But these arguments typically ignore the possibility of spillover effects on other aspects of households' financial circumstances. This paper examines how state-level minimum wages affect the decisions of lenders and low-income borrowers. Using data derived from direct mailings of credit offers, survey-reported usage of high-cost alternative credit products, and debt recorded in credit reports, we find that higher ...
Working Paper
Wage Shocks and the Technological Substitution of Low-Wage Job
We extend the task-based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low-wage employment to technological substitution. We find that increases in the cost of low-wage labor, via minimum wage hikes, lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manually-routine or non-routine low-wage occupations. This suggests that low-wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution. While the short-run employment consequence of this reshuffling on individual workers is economically small, due to ...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Technological Substitution in Low-Wage Labor Markets
This paper uses minimum wage hikes to evaluate the susceptibility of low-wage employment to technological substitution. We find that automation is accelerating and supplanting a broader set of low-wage routine jobs in the decade since the Financial Crisis. Simultaneously, low-wage interpersonal jobs are increasing and offsetting routine job loss. However, interpersonal job growth does not appear to be enough – as it was previous to the Financial Crisis – to fully offset the negative effects of automation on low-wage routine jobs. Employment losses are most evident among minority workers ...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Technological Substitution in Low-Wage Labor Markets
This paper uses minimum wage hikes to evaluate the susceptibility of low-wage employment to technological substitution. We find that automation is accelerating and supplanting a broader set of low-wage routine jobs in the decade since the Financial Crisis. Simultaneously, low-wage interpersonal jobs are increasing and offsetting routine job loss. However, interpersonal job growth does not appear to be enough – as it was previous to the Financial Crisis – to fully offset the negative effects of automation on low-wage routine jobs. Employment losses are most evident among minority workers ...
Working Paper
Who Cares? Paid Sick Leave Mandates, Care-Giving, and Gender
We use employment data from the Current Population Survey to assess the efficacy of state-mandated paid sick leave policies on leave-taking behavior with a focus on any variation by gender. We find that these policies increase leave taking for care-giving for men by 10-20%, and this effect is strongest for men with young children in the household. In addition, we find that Hispanic men and men without a bachelor’s degree, who historically have had low access to paid sick leave, are 20–25% more likely to take care-giving leave. By comparison, we do not find evidence that these policies ...
Working Paper
Why did Rich Families Increase their Fertility? Inequality and Marketization of Child Care
A negative relationship between income and fertility has persisted for so long that its existence is often taken for granted. One economic theory builds on this relationship and argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility between rich and poor. We show that the relationship between income and fertility has ?attened between 1980 and 2010 in the US, a time of increasing inequality, as high income families increased their fertility. These facts challenge the standard theory. We propose that marketization of parental time costs can explain the changing relationship ...