Category: Uncategorized

Arindrajit Dube August 20, 2021 In Coombs et al. (2021), we use bank transaction level data from Earnin to track job finding rates of those previously unemployed and receiving UI benefits for 19 states where pandemic UI expired in June versus 23 states which decided to retain the federal benefits through September. We found that…

by Arindrajit Dube July 18, 2021 So far, 25 states have ended their participation in all or most of the pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) programs: 22 of these states ended them in June, and 3 in July. All of these 25 states have ended the $300/week benefit boost (Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, or PUC). But 21…

(Co-authored with Ben Zipperer. Posted at Washington Center for Equitable Growth) Puerto Rico today faces a serious debt crisis, recently defaulting on a bond payment. The proximate cause is a slowdown in economic growth since the mid-2000s, which has reduced tax revenues, and a declining labor market, where employment growth has been mostly in the red…

In a very helpful blog post, Paul Krugman tries to make sense of Wal-Mart’s recent statement that it is already reaping some gains from raising wages via reduced turnover costs. Krugman’s main point is as follows. If worker productivity is a function of the wage (through improved morale, lower turnover, etc.), and Wal-Mart was initially maximizing profits, then a small change…

Recently, Ken Jacobs, Ian Perry and Jenifer MacGillvary from UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education released a detailed report showing that the majority of public assistance payments—such as EITC, food stamps (SNAP), child care subsidies, TANF, Medicaid–go to working families.  Working, per se, turns out not to be a guarantee against reliance on such assistance. When wages are low…

In January 2014, a funny thing seems to have happened. Parts (though not all) of the econoblogosphere forgot why time series econometrics fell out of favor in the early 1990s when it comes to analyzing minimum wage policies.  Besides the fact that there is a lot more variation in minimum wages than just the federal (or…

In a recent post, Tyler Cowen discusses my recent paper on minimum wages and poverty. Cowen acknowledges that “[my] paper, econometrically speaking, is a clear advance over [a 2010 paper by] Sabia and Burkhauser.”  However, he is more persuaded by “facts” such as simulation results from Sabia and Burkhuaser’s paper that claims “[o]nly 11.3% of…

Excerpted from Section 2 of my paper:  Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes. Key sections are in bold. Alterations (but not deletions) from the paper are marked in square brackets [ ]. In this [post], I review the key papers on the topic of minimum wages and [poverty] based on U.S. data, and…

My post on minimum wages for the Great Divide series at the New York Times: