A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their employees—the price floor below which employees may not sell their labor. Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation by the end of the 20th century. Because minimum wages increase the cost of labor, companies often try to avoid minimum wage laws by using gig workers, by moving labor to locations with lower or nonexistent minimum wages, or by automating job functions. Minimum wage policies can vary significantly between countries or even within a country, with different regions, sectors, or age groups having their own minimum wage rates. These variations are often influenced by factors such as the cost of living, regional economic conditions, and industry-specific factors.
David Edward Card is a Canadian-American labour economist and the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 1997. He was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens jointly awarded the other half.
Alan Bennett Krueger was an American economist who was the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, nominated by President Barack Obama, from May 2009 to October 2010, when he returned to Princeton. He was nominated in 2011 by Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and served in that office from November 2011 to August 2013.
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”. The third woman to win the award, she was the first woman to win the award solo.
David Neumark is an American economist and a Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also directs the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute.
Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
The Institute for the Study of Labor awards a prize each year for outstanding academic achievement in the field of labor economics. The IZA Prize in Labor Economics has become a highly prestigious science award in international economics, is the only international science prize awarded exclusively to labor economists and is considered the most important award in labor economics worldwide. The prize was established in 2002 and is awarded annually through a nomination process and decided upon by the IZA Prize Committee, which consists of internationally renowned labor economists. As a part of the prize, all IZA Prize Laureates contribute a volume as an overview of their most significant findings to the IZA Prize in Labor Economics Series published by Oxford University Press.
Lawrence Francis Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Jeffrey Gale Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics (Emeritus), Harvard University; an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin (Madison); Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Research Fellow for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He also served (1994–1995) as the president of the Economic History Association. His research focus is and has been on comparative economic history and the history of the international economy and development. Economist Hilary Williamson Hoynes is his daughter.
Economists refer to the polarization of the labor force when middle-class jobs—requiring a moderate level of skills, like autoworkers’ jobs—seem to disappear relative to those at the bottom, requiring few skills, and those at the top, requiring greater skill levels. The structure of job opportunities in the United States has sharply polarized over the past two decades, with expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations and low-skill, low wage occupations combined with contracting opportunities in middle-wage, middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs. Although this has contributed to the rise of income inequality in the U.S. it is a minor factor compared to the relatively rapid rise in income and wealth by the top 1%. Employment and economic polarization is widespread across industrialized economies; it is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Over the past decades, wage gains were also polarized, with modest gains at the extremes and smaller gains in the middle. A good description of polarization in Great Britain is one of the first uses of the term, economic polarization.
Wage compression refers to the empirical regularity that wages for low-skilled workers and wages for high-skilled workers tend toward one another. As a result, the prevailing wage for a low-skilled worker exceeds the market-clearing wage, resulting in unemployment for low-skilled workers. Meanwhile, the prevailing wage for high-skilled workers is below the market-clearing wage, creating a short supply of high-skilled workers.
Thomas Lemieux is a Canadian economist and professor at the University of British Columbia.
Gordon Howard Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Judith K. Hellerstein was the Chair of the Economics department between 2019 and 2022 and is currently a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, US. She is a former co-editor of The Journal of Human Resources, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she chairs the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys. She served as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers during 2011–2012.
Chinhui Juhn is the Henry Graham Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of IZA Institute of Labor Economics. She graduated from Yale University in 1984, and completed her PhD in economics at the University of Chicago in 1991. She is an Editor of the American Economic Review, one of the most cited journals in the world. Together with her husband, Edward R. Allen III, she is a patron of the arts in Houston.
The China shock is the impact of rising Chinese exports on manufacturing employment in the United States and Europe after China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Studies have estimated that the China trade shock reduced U.S. manufacturing employment by 550,000, 1.8-2.0 million, and 2.0-2.4 million. Losses in manufacturing employment have also been observed in Norway, Spain, Canada, and Germany. Studies have shown that there was "higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages in local labor markets" in U.S. regions that have industries that competed with Chinese industries.
David Dorn is a Swiss economist and currently the UBS Professor of Globalization and Labor Markets at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on the interplay between globalization and labour markets. In 2014, his research was awarded the Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Melissa Schettini Kearney is an American economist who is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution; a scholar affiliate and member of the board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO); and a scholar affiliate of the MIT Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She has been an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy since 2019 and of the Journal of Economic Literature since 2017. Kearney served as director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings from 2013 to 2015 and as co-chair of the JPAL State and Local Innovation Initiative from 2015 to 2018.
Oleg Itskhoki is a Russian-American economist specialized on macroeconomics and international economics and a professor of economics at the Harvard University. He won the John Bates Clark Medal for his "fundamental contributions to both international finance and international trade" in 2022.
Luigi Pistaferri is an Italian-American economist and the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is known for his research in labor and macroeconomics, focusing on family consumption, labor supply, welfare reform, and inequality. He is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center on Longevity. He is the co-Director or GRID. During the period 2012-17 he served as a co-editor of the American Economic Review; he is currently one of the co-editors of the Journal of Political Economy. He is the author of the book The Economics of Consumption: Theory and Evidence.
