Minimum Wages and Aggregate Job Growth: Causal Effect or Statistical Artifact?

A recent paper by Meer and West argues that minimum wages reduce aggregate employment growth, and that this relationship is masked by looking at employment levels. I also find a negative association between minimum wages and aggregate employment growth using both the Business Dynamics Statistics and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages datasets, and it is sizable for some time periods. However, I show that this negative association is present in exactly the wrong sectors. It is particularly strong in manufacturing which hires very few minimum wage workers. At the same time, there is no such association in retail, or in accommodation and food services which together hire nearly 2/3 of all minimum wage workers. These results indicate that the negative association between minimum wages and aggregate employment growth does not represent a causal relationship. Rather the association stems from an inability to account for differences between high and low minimum wage states and the timing of minimum wage increases. Consistent with that interpretation, when I use bordering counties to construct more credible control groups, I find no such negative correlation between minimum wages and overall employment growth

Pooling Multiple Case Studies Using Synthetic Controls: An Application to Minimum Wage Policies

We propose a simple, distribution-free method for pooling synthetic control case studies using the mean percentile rank. We also test for heterogeneous treatment effects using the distribution of estimated ranks, which has a known form. We propose a cross-validation based procedure for model selection. Using 29 cases of state minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2013, we find a sizable, positive and statistically significant effect on the average teen wage. We do detect heterogeneity in the wage elasticities, consistent with differential bites in the policy. In contrast, the employment estimates suggest a small constant effect not distinguishable from zero

Do Frictions Matter in the Labor Market? Accessions, Separations and Minimum Wage Effects

We measure labor market frictions using a strategy that bridges design-based and structural approaches: estimating an equilibrium search model using reduced-form minimum wage elasticities identified from border discontinuities and fitted with Bayesian and LIML methods. We begin by providing the first test of U.S. minimum wage effects on labor market flows and find negative effects on employment flows, but not levels. Separations and accessions fall among restaurants and teens, especially those with low tenure. Our estimated parameters of a search model with wage posting and heterogeneous workers and firms imply that frictions help explain minimum wage effects.minimum wage, labor market flows, monopsony, Bayesian estimation

Nurse Unions and Patient Outcomes

We estimate the impact of nurse unions on health care quality using patient discharge data and the universe of hospital unionizations in California between 1996 and 2005. We find that hospitals with a successful union election outperform hospitals with a failed election in 12 of 13 nurse sensitive patient outcomes measures. We also find that hospitals with a unionization drive are establishments with declining quality as measured by patient outcomes. When such declines are accounted for using hospital-specific trends, we find that unionized hospitals also outperform hospitals without any union election in the same 12 of 13 outcome measures. The timing of the quality improvement is consistent with a causal impact: the largest changes occur precisely in the year of unionization. The biggest improvements are found in the incidence of metabolic derangement, pulmonary failure, and central nervous system disorders such as depression and delusion, where the estimated changes are between 15% and 60% of the mean incidence for those measures. Dynamic estimates confirm that the improvements in health care outcomes occur within the first two years following nurse unionization

The Labor Market Impact of Employer Health Benefit Mandates: Evidence from San Francisco's Health Care Security Ordinance

Examines the impact of a policy requiring employers to provide employee health benefits or contribute to a public option health plan on employment, earnings, and customer surcharges by industry and county

The effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs: evidence from the United States using a bunching estimator

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. Using state-level variation in U.S. minimum wages, we implement our method by providing new estimates on the effect of the minimum wage on the frequency distribution of hourly wages. First, we present a case study of a large, indexed minimum wage increase using administrative data on hourly wages from Washington State. Then we implement an event study analysis pooling 138 minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2016. In both cases, we find that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged. At the same time, the direct effect of the minimum wage on average earnings was amplified by modest wage spillovers at the bottom of the wage distribution. Our estimates by detailed demographic groups show that the lack of job loss is not explained by labor-labor substitution at the bottom of the wage distribution. We also find no evidence of disemployment when we consider higher levels of minimum wages. However, we do find some evidence of reduced employment in tradable sectors. In contrast to our bunching-based estimates, we show that conventional studies can produce misleading inference due to spurious changes in employment higher up in the wage distribution

Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Aggregate Employment

This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, we find no statistically significant impact of increasing UI generosity on aggregate employment. Our point estimates are uniformly small in magnitude, and the most precise estimates rule out employment-to-population ratio reductions in excess of 0.32 percentage points from the UI extension. We show that a moderately sized fiscal multiplier can rationalize our findings with the small negative labor supply impact of UI typically found in the literature

Fairness and Frictions: The Impact of Unequal Raises on Quit Behavior

We analyze how quits responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages using an unusual feature of a pay raise at a large U.S. retailer. The firm's use of discrete pay steps created discontinuities in raises, where workers earning within 1 cent of each other received new wages that differed by 10 cents. First, we estimate a regression discontinuity (RD) model based on own wages; we find large causal effects of wages on quits, with quit elasticities less than -10. Next, we address whether the overall quit response reflects the impact of comparisons to market wages or to the wages of in-store peers. Here we use a multi-dimensional RD design that includes both a sharp RD in the own wage and a fuzzy RD in the average peer wage. We find that the large quit response mostly reflects relative-pay concerns and not market comparisons. After accounting for peer effects, quits do not appear to be very sensitive to wages consistent with the presence of significant search frictions. Finally, we find that the relative-pay effect is nonlinear and driven mainly by workers who are paid less than their peers suggesting concerns about fairness or disadvantageous inequity

Complementarity of Shared Compensation and Decision-Making Systems: Evidence from the American Labor Market

This paper examines the relationship between shared capitalist modes of pay and shared modes of decision-making via employee involvement and related committees and between them and measures of productivity and worker well-being in two data sets: the employee based Worker Participation and Representation Survey and the California Establishment Survey. It finds in both data sets that the forms of shared compensation are complementary in the sense that they are more likely to be found together than if firms chose them separately; that shared compensation systems are positively associated with shared decision-making; and that combining shared compensation systems and employee involvement has greater impacts on outcomes than each system by itself.