News
CNBC | Unemployed and hoping for help from Congress
The House of Representatives is out of session until February 26. The Senate leaves tomorrow, not to return until February 25. Between now and then, more than 100,000 Americans will join the more than 1.7 million long-term jobless who have exhausted unemployment benefits that, only two months ago, would have continued for as much as a year.
Econ Comments & Analysis
NBER | A Contribution to the Empirics of Reservation Wages
This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported reservation wages decline at a modest rate over the spell of unemployment, with point estimates ranging from 0.05 to 0.14 percent per week of unemployment.
CATO | Minimum Wage Hike Means More Sub-Minimum Workers
In the State of the Union address, President Obama endorsed a bill to raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage by nearly 40% over three years to $10.10 an hour in 2016. That would be an exact copy of what President Bush did on May 25, 2007, by signing into law a 40% minimum wage hike in three stages — from $5.15 to $5.85 on July 24, 2007, then $6.55 a year later and $7.25 on July 24, 2009. Have we not learned anything from what happened last time?
