Documents Zipperer, Ben 3 results

"This essay examines the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits in fifteen important low-wage occupations. Even after controlling for important differences between union and nonunion workers—including such factors as age and education level—unionization substantially improves the pay and benefits offered in what are otherwise low-paying occupations.On average, in the low-wage occupations analyzed here, unionization raised workers' wages by just over 16 percent—about $1.75 per hour—compared to those of nonunion workers. Unionization also raises the likelihood that a worker has employer-provided health insurance or an employer-sponsored retirement plan by 25 percentage points. These union wage and benefit effects are particularly impressive given the widespread belief that many of the jobs analyzed here are inherently incapable of providing decent pay and benefits."

"The authors assess the critique by Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2014) of minimum wage studies that found small effects on teen employment. Data from 1979 to 2014 contradict NSW; the authors show that the disemployment suggested by a model assuming parallel trends across U.S. states mostly reflects differential pre-existing trends. A data-driven LASSO procedure that optimally corrects for state trends produces a small employment elasticity (–0.01). Even a highly sparse model rules out substantial disemployment effects, contrary to NSW's claim that the authors discard too much information. Synthetic controls do place more weight on nearby states—confirming the value of regional controls—and generate an elasticity of ?0.04. A similar elasticity (?0.06) obtains from a design comparing contiguous border counties, which the authors show to be good controls. NSW's preferred matching estimates mix treatment and control units, obtain poor matches, and find the highest employment declines where the relative minimum wage falls. These findings refute NSW's key claims."