A comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labor market outcomes concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.

Minimum Wages and Employment focuses on the "new minimum wage research." This is the first comprehensive review of the literature in the past fifteen years. It includes the initial round of the new minimum wage research on the employment effects of the minimum wage, major conceptual and empirical issues that arose out of that research, recent increases in minimum wage laws, and the empirical research on the employment effects of the minimum wage in other countries. Minimum Wages and Employment provides an assessment of alternative models of the labor market. It offers general conclusions about the effects of the minimum wage on employment that are relevant to policymakers, pointing out in what context and for which workers the minimum wage will have consequences. Finally, by presenting a comprehensive review of the more recent minimum wage literature, the authors explain the range of results in the literature, identify sources of differences in these results, and determine what conclusions can be drawn from the literature.

Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66% to about 63%. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. The authors use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Their overall assessment is that much -- but not all -- of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 is structural in nature. As a result, while the authors see some of the current low level of the participation rate as indicative of labor market slack, they do not expect the participation rate to show a substantial increase from current levels as labor market conditions continue to improve. Tables and figures. This is a print on demand report.

A central issue in estimating the employment effects of minimum wages is the appropriate comparison group for states (or other regions) that adopt or increase the minimum wage. In recent research, Dube et al. (2010) and Allegretto et al. (2011) argue that past U.S. research is flawed because it does not restrict comparison areas to those that are geographically proximate and fails to control for changes in low-skill labor markets that are correlated with minimum wage increases. They argue that using "local controls" establishes that higher minimum wages do not reduce employment of less-skilled workers. In Neumark et al. (2014), we present evidence that their methods fail to isolate more reliable identifying information and lead to incorrect conclusions. Moreover, for subsets of treatment groups where the identifying variation they use is supported by the data, the evidence is consistent with past findings of disemployment effects. Allegretto et al. (2013) have challenged our conclusions, continuing the debate regarding some key issues regarding choosing comparison groups for estimating minimum wage effects. We explain these issues and evaluate the evidence. In general, we find little basis for their analyses and conclusions, and argue that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for very low-skilled workers - in particular, for teens.

The first essay tackles the role of subsidized contraception in influencing fertility. It draws on two types of disruptions that affected the public supply of free contraceptives in the Philippines: a sharp reduction induced by the phase out of contraceptive donations to the country from an external donor coupled with a government policy that withdrew public funding to fill the supply shortfall, and substantial fluctuations in the shipment of free contraceptives to the country's provinces that were brought about by supply chain issues. It finds that birth rates were responsive to both broad and transitory changes in public contraceptive supply: provinces which experienced bigger declines in the supply of free contraceptives also had larger increases (or smaller decreases) in birth rates, while temporary supply drops (increases) were followed by rising (falling) birth rates. It also identifies poor, low-educated, and rural women as groups which may have difficulties coping with short-term gaps in public contraceptive supply. The second essay develops a novel approach of framing couple decision making as a deliberative and engaging process that may lead to a spouse prevailing over the other, but not necessarily so, in which case the decision-making authority is shared between spouses. It argues that when joint decision making is observed, it could be interpreted as indicative of cooperative spousal behavior. Using a rich dataset from a homogenous set of communities in the Philippines, it explores the patterns of household consumption spending that accompany the characterized decision-making arrangement. After controlling for total household resources and several factors that influence each spouse's bargaining power, the evidence suggests that children fare more favorably under couple's joint decision making than under sole decision making by either the mother or the father. This result likely stems from couples' ability to coordinate their spending priorities under joint decision making, which mitigates the underprovision of household public goods. The third essay, which is joint work with David Neumark and William Wascher, assesses recent studies claiming that estimates from the panel data approach used in much of the "new minimum wage research" are flawed because this approach fails to account for spatial heterogeneity. These recent studies use research designs intended to control for this heterogeneity, and conclude that minimum wages in the United States have not reduced employment. The essay explores the ability of these research designs to isolate reliable identifying information and tests their untested assumptions about the construction of better control groups. It presents evidence pointing to serious problems with these research designs. Moreover, it shows that new methods which let the data identify the appropriate control groups leads to evidence of disemployment effects, with teen employment elasticities near -0.15. It concludes that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage.