Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? Accounting for Heterogeneity and Selectivity in State Panel Data

Traditional estimates that often find minimum wage disemployment effects include controls for state unemployment rates and state‐ and year‐fixed effects. Using CPS data on teens for the period 1990–2009, we show that such estimates fail to account for heterogeneous employment patterns that are correlated with selectivity among states with minimum wages. As a result, the estimates are often biased and not robust to the source of identifying variation. Including controls for long‐term growth differences among states and for heterogeneous economic shocks renders the employment and hours elasticities indistinguishable from zero and rules out any but very small disemployment effects. Dynamic evidence further shows the nature of bias in traditional estimates, and it also rules out all but very small negative long‐run effects. In addition, we do not find evidence that employment effects vary in different parts of the business cycle. We also consider predictable versus unpredictable changes in the minimum wage by looking at the effects of state indexation of the minimum wage.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Rounding on the SPF Probabilities of Decline and Output Growth Histograms

I consider the possibility that respondents to the Survey of Professional Forecasters round their probability forecasts of the event that real output will decline in the future, as well as their reported output growth probability distributions. I make various plausible assumptions about respondents’ rounding practices, and show how these impinge upon the apparent mismatch between probability forecasts of a decline in output and the probabilities of this event implied by the annual output growth histograms. I find that rounding accounts for about a quarter of the inconsistent pairs of forecasts.     

German Employers’ Inputs to Employee Skills Development

Using organizational level survey data, this article analyzes larger German private employers’ inputs to employee skills development, to test the theory that unions and employers’ associations raise employer incentives for training. Large German employers maintained their overall contribution between 1995 and 1999. Indicative data for 2004 suggest that this has continued, yet neither membership of employers’ associations nor high union densities influenced it.     

Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: A Critical Review of the Literature

This article surveys the diverse research that examines racial disparities in mortgage lending markets in the context of the fair housing legislation of recent decades. A review of the theoretical models, data, and empirical methods reveals deficiencies in all three areas. A new research agenda focusing on development of more complete models of mortgage lending together with panel data tracking mortgage loan performance over time is needed.     

Nonlinearities in Exchange-Rate Dynamics: Evidence from Five Currencies, 1973–94

Although exchange rates appear to follow a random walk when tested against linear alternatives, the null hypothesis of a random walk is rejected against a cubic alternative which embodies the intuition that the rate of mean-reversion increases with distance from equilibrium. A possible theoretical foundation for such a model is suggested. The model is tested on bilateral real exchange rates between four major currencies, and on the real effective exchange rate of these four plus the Australian dollar. The cubic model consistently outperforms its linear counterpart and the results imply that real exchange rates are in fact stationary.