Die Einführung des flächendeckenden gesetzlichen Mindestlohns von 8,50 Euro ist ein großes, mit vielen sozialpolitischen Risiken verbundenes Experiment. Im ersten Teil dieses Übersichtsartikels zeigen wir, dass weder die unterschiedlichen theoretischen Erklärungsmodelle noch die große Anzahl empirischer Arbeiten aus anderen Ländern die Hoffnung rechtfertigen, der Mindestlohn würde in Deutschland keine substantiellen Beschäftigungsverluste mit sich bringen. Im zweiten Teil verwenden wir dann aktuelle Daten zur Lohnverteilung in Deutschland, um mit Hilfe einer Simulationsrechnung für die unterschiedlichen theoretischen Szenarien zu untersuchen, welche Beschäftigungsrisiken für unterschiedliche Zielgruppen durch die Einführung eines flächendeckenden Mindestlohns von 8,50 Euro drohen. Besonders stark betroffen sind die heutigen „Aufstocker“, die von der Mindestlohnerhöhung kaum etwas mit nach Hause nehmen können, aber in Zukunft einem ungleich höheren Arbeitsplatzrisiko ausgesetzt sind. Diese Befunde lassen zweifeln, dass die Politik mit dem Mindestlohn ihre erklärten Ziele einer erhöhten Verteilungsgerechtigkeit und der Entlastung der öffentlichen Haushalte erreichen kann.

The thesis discusses what it means to institute a minimum wage and the different types of wages in the Czech Republic. It also deals with an overview of changes in the minimum wage in selected countries of the European Union, and unemployment in the countries. To find out what you can buy for minimum wage are given consumer basket of major cities in selected countries. The next chapter deals with the influence of the minimum wage on unemployment. The conclusion discusses the possible impact of the minimum wage in the construction industry.

To many economists the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution is puzzling, since the MW is considered a "blunt instrument'' for redistribution. To delve deeper in this issue we build models in which workers are heterogeneous in ability. In the first model, the government does not engage in any type of redistributive policies - except for the payment of unemployment benefits; we find that the MW is preferred by the majority of workers (even when the unemployed receive very generous unemployment benefits). In the second model, the government engages in redistribution through the public provision of private goods. We show that (i) the introduction of a MW can be preferred by a majority of workers only if the unemployed receive benefits which are substantially below the after-tax earnings they would have had in the perfectly competitive case, (ii) for a given generosity of the unemployment benefit scheme, the maximum, politically viable, MW is lower than in the absence of in-kind redistribution, and (iii) the MW institution is politically viable only when there is a limited degree of in-kind redistribution. These findings can possibly explain why a well-developed social safety net in Scandinavia tends to co-exist with the absence of a national MW, whereas in Southern Europe the MW institution "complements'' the absence of a well-developed social safety net.

This dissertation studies the determinants of the spatial distribution of economic activity and how such activity is affected by public policy. The dissertation contains three chapters. In the first chapter, we ask: what role does labor market competitiveness play in determining the location decisions of firms and workers, and the resulting spatial wage distribution? To answer this question, we develop a model of monopsony power in spatial equilibrium. Workers and firms are free to locate in any labor market, and the degree of market power a firm enjoys depends on the number of competing firms in its location. We show the model can rationalize concentrations of economic activity and the city-size wage premium through an endogenous labor market competitiveness channel: in larger labor markets, endogenous firm entry increases labor market competition, decreasing wage markdowns and increasing equilibrium wages. To estimate the magnitude of labor market competitiveness differences across space, we utilize matched employer-employee data from Germany. Using a canonical empirical methodology from the labor economics literature on monopsony, we estimate that labor markets are significantly more competitive in larger cities. Calibrating the model to match this reduced-form evidence, we find endogenous labor market competitiveness can explain 37% of the city-size wage premium and 14% of all agglomeration. In the second chapter, we use the new framework developed in Chapter 1 to study the spatial and welfare implications of the 2015 German national minimum wage law. We first show a traditional spatial model that ignores variation in monopsony power across space predicts large unemployment effects in smaller, lower-wage labor markets, contradicting the reduced-form evidence on the effects of the law. Turning to our monopsony framework, we note that in the calibrated model, monopsony power is strongest in smaller, lower-wage labor markets: exactly those that the perfectly competitive model predicted would have the largest unemployment effects. Imposing the minimum wage in the calibrated monopsony framework, we find results in line with the reduced-form evidence — minimal unemployment effects, even in the lowest-wage labor markets, and therefore significant convergence in regional nominal wage inequality. Accounting for spatially-varying monopsony power, we find the enacted national law outperforms an alternative policy with a lower level of the minimum wage in East Germany, while a law that takes into account variation in productivity and competitiveness significantly outperforms both. In the third chapter (joint with Pablo Ernesto Warnes and Timur Abbiasov), we examine the effects of pedestrianization on business visits. There are significant debates in urban planning on the use of road space in cities. Should (some) streets be pedestrianized? Critics suggest closing streets to vehicles can harm local businesses by reducing access. The effect of pedestrianization on business visits has been difficult to assess due to the lack of an appropriate experiment and lack of systematic data on foot traffic. We examine a unique recent experiment, New York City's Open Streets program, which closed hundreds of street segments to cars, and utilize new anonymized cellphone geodata to measure visits to businesses. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, we find small effects of the program on visits overall, with sufficient precision to rule out significant negative effects, contradicting critics' predictions. We find significant positive effects on visits for Open Streets further from the Central Business District, especially for restaurants and bars. For such businesses, we find a 14% increase in visits as a result of the program.

<p>Food safety is important to prevent foodborne illnesses that can negatively affect public health and the economy. Preventative measures can be taken by government agencies, food-related workers, and consumers to reduce the occurrence of such illnesses. This paper examines the impact of government policies on food safety from the perspective of consumers, restaurant employees and employers, and food processing workers. The first essay explores how food safety recalls affect consumer behavior. The second essay studies the impact of minimum wage policies on service quality in the restaurant industry. The third essay investigates the effect of minimum wage policies on product food safety in the meat and poultry processing industry. </p>

The industrial revolution was the start of increasing technological advancements that are continuing to grow today. Technology improves accuracy, efficiency and is more productive in comparison to human labor as it does not require breaks and cannot violate any labor laws. With many innovations available today, firms have more options to choose from and can select the relatively cheaper solution. The push for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage affects the firm's options, and the use of technology might increasingly become the more viable choice. This study took data from the years 1993 to 2016 and created two regressions using the unemployment rate and job automation rate as the dependent variables. The independent variables looked at were the year, the population growth rate, the minimum wage, inflation, the gross domestic product growth rate, and the consumer price index. After normality checks and transformations were done two regressions were run, and the models were studied to determine the effects. Both regressions were found to be valid with f-statistics lower than one percent. All the statistically significant variables were retained in the model, and the insignificant variables were omitted to reproduce the regression and check for accuracy. The models with the lower Akaike's information criterion and Bayesian information criterion values were kept and used as the final models. Overall the regressions found that the year and consumer price index had the most substantial effects on the unemployment rate, and the consumer price index had the strongest effect on the automation rate. Limitations on the study include the data available, a possible lag in the effect of the minimum wage, and the possible inaccuracy in using industrial robot installation as a measure for job automation.

2024 / This thesis empirically evaluates the impact of voluntary minimum wage changes to firm reputation using data from the hiring website Indeed.com. As a starting point, I show that when Target and Amazon unilaterally raised their minimum wages, their ratings on Indeed.com improved substantially across multiple dimensions: work-life balance, compensation, job security, management, and culture. Next, I examine the impact of a focal firm voluntarily raising its minimum wage on the ratings of similar firms in proximal locations. Using a differences-in-differences (DiD) design, I present preliminary evidence that competitors that are located near the focal firm may expe- rience a negative reputational shock relative to similar firms that are geographically distant. Additionally, this thesis applies novel sentiment analysis techniques to eval- uate minimum wage policies on review text. Using state-of-the-art NLP models such as Claude, ChatGPT, and RoBERTa, I identify and score two topics that are im- portant to job reviewers, but do not receive star ratings on Indeed.com: ”Scheduling and Hours,” and ”Workload and Compensation.” Finally, I use LLMs to perform zero-shot fine-grained sentiment analysis to investigate how a company’s reputation in regards to these topics is impacted by voluntary minimum wage policies. In these analyses, I am not able to refute the null hypothesis, though the method demostrates promise for further development.

Thesis advisor: Michael D. Grubb / Thesis advisor: Julie Holland Mortimer / This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays that explore industrial organization of the advertising agency and airline markets, as well as the role of local political environment in identification of treatment effects in minimum wage studies. In the first chapter, “Competitor Avoidance and the Structure of the Advertising Agency Industry in the United States,” co-authored with Sylvia Hristakeva, we develop an applied theory model to show that the tendency of advertisers to avoid sharing their agencies with product-market competitors may have led to creation of a unique organizational structure in the advertising agency market, known as a holding company (HC). HCs control multiple agencies and coordinate their bidding choices when competing for new clients. Although many other professional service markets, such as markets for legal and accounting services, feature competitor avoidance, HCs are forbiddingly costly in these markets due to restrictions on outside ownership. Using a theoretical model, we show that HC structure helps agencies manage client conflicts by allowing them to choose an unconflicted agency to bid for a client. We collect a novel dataset on identities of bidding agencies and estimate that serving an advertiser's competitor reduces an agency's odds to compete for the advertiser by 91.6 percent. We predict that the market concentration would increase by 35 percent if competitor avoidance was not a factor in this market. We also predict that banning bid coordination within HCs would increase the average number of bidders in an account review from four to nine. Auction theory predicts that an increase in the number of bidders would create a downward pressure on the mark-ups charged by agencies, however some of this pressure may be counteracted by increased costs of winning a client due to entering multiple bids. In the second chapter, “’Use It or Lose It,’ or ‘Cheat and Keep?’ The Effects of Slot Restrictions on Airline Incentives,” co-authored with Ratib Ali, we investigate the impact of slot control on competition in the domestic airline market. The Federal Aviation Administration manages congestion in high-density airports by capping the number of flights permitted in any given hour and allocating the rights (or slots) to a take-off or landing among airlines. Airlines must use their slots at least 80% of the time to keep them for the next season. This rule creates a perverse incentive for airlines to hold on to underutilized slots by operating unprofitable flights instead of forfeiting these slots to a rival. Using exogenous removal of slot control at the Newark Airport in 2016, we investigate the lengths at which airlines go to meet the minimum requirements that let them keep the slots while violating what a neutral observer might call the “spirit” of the regulation. In the third chapter, “Political Trends in Minimum Wage Policy Evaluation Studies,” co-authored with Andrew Copland and Jean-François Gauthier, we explore the role of local political environment in identification of treatment effects in minimum wage studies. The effects of minimum wage on employment in low-wage sectors have long been debated in the literature. Some economists find small disemployment effects, whereas others argue that these effects are close to zero and statistically insignificant. The core of the debate lies in establishing adequate control groups for areas that experience minimum wage changes. At the same time, minimum wage changes are almost always a consequence of a political vote. Our paper adds to the debate surrounding control group identification by highlighting the importance of accounting for underlying political trends. Failure to do so may result in a violation of the standard “parallel trends” assumption maintained in most of the literature. We illustrate this possibility by re-estimating Dube et al. (2010) on a sample of politically aligned and unaligned counties and controlling for state expenditures that may be used to finance confounding policies. We document that the sample of never politically aligned county pairs produces a positive and significant estimate of elasticity of employment (0.245), suggesting that the restaurant industry labor market may be non-competitive. In contrast, when we restrict the Dube et al. (2010) sample to perfectly politically aligned counties, we obtain a marginally significant estimate of employment elasticity of -0.145. These two estimates explain the seminal result in Dube et al. (2010) that the elasticity of employment with respect to minimum wage is zero. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Bien qu'il soit désormais établi que les institutions du travail (tel que la syndicalisation et le salaire minimum) aient eu pour effet de réduire l'inégalité des salaires entre les travailleurs au Canada et dans d'autres pays industrialisés, leur impact sur l'inégalité des revenus entre les familles ou les ménages reste incertain. Cette étude a pour but d'estimer l'impact de la densité syndicale et du salaire minimum réel sur l'évolution de l'inégalité des revenus de marché entre les ménages canadiens durant les années 1981 à 2008. À partir d'une base de données qui intègre des données annuelles agrégées par province, et en maintenant constant un ensemble de facteurs, les estimations par effets fixes indiquent que la densité syndicale a réduit l'inégalité des revenus mesurée au moyen du coefficient de Gini, alors que le salaire minimum réel a plutôt eu pour effet d'accroître celle-ci. Les résultats d'estimation indiquent également que le taux d'activité et la scolarité moyenne sont les principaux facteurs à avoir réduit l'inégalité des revenus, alors que le taux de chômage, le changement technologique (mesuré de différentes façons) et l'immigration récente ont contribué à l'accroître. / While some consensus exists that labor institutions (such as unionization and minimum wage) narrowed wages inequality among workers in Canada, as well as in other industrialized countries, there is little agreement about their outcome on income inequality among families or households. This study investigates how union density and real minimum wage affected the evolution of market income inequality among Canadian households between 1981 and 2008. Utilizing a dataset that incorporates annual data aggregated by province, and holding constant for a range of other factors, fix effects estimates indicate that union density narrowed income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, while real minimum wage widened it instead. Estimates further suggest that participation rate and educational attainment are the main factors to have dampened income inequality in recent years, whereas unemployment rate, technological change (measured in different ways) and recent immigration are found to have contributed to greater income inequality.

WORKING POOR IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC Abstract Even though poverty is not the death or life question in developed countries it is necessary to pay attention to it. The topic of poverty, social cohesion and social exclusion plays now an increasing role in the EU agenda; working poor started to be explored in 1990s there. Working poor are people poor despite working. Work should serve as a protection of poverty, it should guarantee better living standard to employed people in comparison to those dependent on social protection. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the issue of working poor, to identify them, to find out the reasons why they are poor and to develop measures to help them not to be poor. This thesis brings a comprehensive view on the working poor in the Czech Republic. The focus is on the poverty rate as well as characteristics of working poor. Methods for measuring this phenomenon have not been fully developed yet, there is still not a consensus on the most suitable methods. Different methods are introduced, compared and critically evaluated in the first - theoretically oriented - part of the thesis. Combination and modification of existing methods creates a base for methodology used in this thesis. The core part of the thesis is dedicated to the detailed analysis of working poor in the...