, and seminar participants at Brown, Cornell-PAM, Texas A&M, and the 2014 Young Economists Jamboree at Duke University for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank the University of California at San Diego for grant funding through the General Campus Subcommittee on Research. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w20724.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We estimate the minimum wage's effects on low-skilled workers' employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not. Second, we use 12 months of baseline data to divide low-skilled workers into a "target" group, whose baseline wage rates were directly affected, and a "within-state control" group with slightly higher baseline wage rates. Over three subsequent years, we find that binding minimum wage increases had significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers. Lost income reflects contributions from employment declines, increased probabilities of working without pay (i.e., an "internship" effect), and lost wage growth associated with reductions in experience accumulation. Methodologically, we show that our approach identifies targeted workers more precisely than the demographic and industrial proxies used regularly in the literature. Additionally, because we identify targeted workers on a population-wide basis, our approach is relatively well suited for extrapolating to estimates of the minimum wage's effects on aggregate employment. Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.

No abstract

This study examines the long run impacts of equity market volatility on index returns of nine major international stock exchanges in the Western and Asian regions. This study employs the text-based Economic Market Volatility (EMV) index to measure the degree of uncertainty in the U.S. stock market. Using monthly data from December 2001 to August 2018, the estimation results derived using the standard and nonlinear ARDL models deliver several key messages. First, rising U. S. stock market volatility exhibits significant and negative impacts on stock market returns, except for the stock markets of China, Hong Kong, and India whose impacts are negative but insignificant. Second, the use of the nonlinear ARDL model does not show any signs of asymmetry in the relationship between stock market returns and changes in the EMV index, suggesting that the change in the EMV index has symmetric effects on the changes in major stock indices.

Interactions between redistributive policies can confront low‐income households with complicated choices. We study one such interaction, namely the relationship between Medicaid eligibility thresholds and the minimum wage. A minimum wage increase reduces the number of hours a low‐skilled individual can work while retaining Medicaid eligibility. We show that the empirical and welfare implications of this interaction can depend crucially on the relevance of labor market frictions. Absent frictions, affected workers may maintain Medicaid eligibility through small reductions in hours of work. With frictions, affected workers may lose Medicaid eligibility unless they leave their initial job. Empirically, we find that workers facing this scenario became less likely to participate in Medicaid, less likely to work, and more likely to spend time looking for new jobs, including search while employed. The observed outcomes suggest that low‐skilled workers face substantial labor market frictions. Because adjustment is costly, tinkering with safety net program parameters that determine the location of program eligibility notches can be harmful to beneficiaries.