Journal of Labor Economics19831(1), 66-100open access
The employment and earnings effects of the minimum wage are estimated by parameterizing a hypothesized relationship between underlying market employment and wage relationships versus observed wage and employment distributions in the presence of a legislated minimum. If there had been no minimum during the 1973-78 period, we estimate that employment among out-of-school men 16-24 would have been approximately 4% higher than it was. Among young men 16-19 employment would have been about 7% higher; among those 20-24, 2% higher. Employment among black youth 16-24 would have been almost 6% higher than it was, compared with somewhat less than 4% for white youth. Although it is sometimes argued that the adverse employment effects of the minimum are offset by increased earnings, we find virtually no earnings effect. Had the minimum not been raised over the 1973-78 period, inflation would have greatly moderated the adverse employment effects of the minimum, with approximately two-thirds of the potential employment gains from elimination of the minimum attained. The weight of our evidence is inconsistent with a general increase in youth wage rates with increases in the real minimum. Our findings support the hypothesis that the effects of the minimum are concentrated on youth with subminimum market wage rates.
The effects of minimum wage legislation on the employment and wage rates of youth are estimated using a new statistical approach. We find that without the minimum, not only would the percent of out-of-school youth who are employed be 4 to 6 percent higher than it is, but also that these youth would earn more.
This paper presents a comparison of three distributed lag estimators: OLS, the Almon procedure, and the Hannan inefficient method. Each method is compared for sample sizes of 50 and 100 for several alternative distributed lag shapes and residual process structures. The results not only reveal the relative performance of these estimators, but also provide evidence on each method's performance under misspecification with respect to lag length and the residual process.
The stability of the demand function for money has received extensive attention over the past two decades. However, there is no precise meaning of the term stability in the literature. The issue is most often discussed in reference to time-series estimates of the function and generally based on three characteristics: 1) The demand for money can be explained by a small set of variables as determined by various statistical tests; 2) the function does not exhibit marked shifts over time; 3) the function is capable of generating reasonable forecasts outside of the interval of estimation. Stephen Goldfeld (1973) and John Boorman in exhaustive surveys conclude that relatively simple formulations of the demand for money yield stable shortand long-run functions. Despite some negative evidence (see William Poole), stability of the demand function has been fairly well accepted, at least up to the last few years (Goldfeld, 1976). The overwhelming majority of evidence is based on time-series models using constant coefficient estimation procedures. Yet, arguments can be developed to show that estimating a demand function for money via constant coefficient methods amounts to misspecification. The time varying characteristics of the demand function should be explicitly recognized in the estimation procedure to properly investigate the stability issue. This study is organized around two objectives: First, to use a theoretical model of risk preferences to develop the opportunity cost aspect of the demand function for money implying time varying coefficients and second, to provide within and outside sample comparisons of constant and variable coefficient estimates of various demand function specifications.