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This chapter analyzes the effects of introducing a graduated minimum wage in a model with optimal income taxation in which a government seeks to maximize social welfare. It shows that the optimal graduated minimum wage increases social welfare by increasing the low-productivity workers’ consumption and bringing it closer to the first-best. The chapter also describes how the graduated minimum wage in a social welfare optimum depends on important economy characteristics such as the government’s revenue needs, the social welfare weight of low-productivity workers, and the numbers and productivities of the different types of workers.

Building on recent advances in inverse probability weighted identification and estimation of counterfactual distributions, the authors examine the history of wage earnings for women and their potential wage distributions in the United States. These potentials are two counterfactuals, what if women received men’s market “rewards” for their own “skills,” and what if they received the women’s rewards but for men’s characteristics? Using the Current Population Survey data from 1976 to 2013, the authors analyze the entire counterfactual distributions to separate the “structure” and human capital “composition” effect. In contrast to Maasoumi and Wang (2019), the reference outcome in these decompositions is women’s observed earnings distribution, and inverse probability methods are employed, rather than the conditional quantile approaches. The authors provide decision theoretic measures of the distance between two distributions, to complement assessments based on mean, median, or particular quantiles. We assess uniform rankings of alternate distributions by tests of stochastic dominance in order to identify evaluations robust to subjective measures. Traditional moment-based measures severely underestimate the declining trend of the structure effect. Nevertheless, dominance rankings suggest that the structure (“discrimination”?) effect is bigger than human capital characteristics.

The mathematical science approach to the study of social affairs has been much debated not least among scholars of international relations. Wight (2002, p. 37) reviews the current debate – discussing the views of Michael Nicholson and Steve Smith quite extensively – and comments:all of this adds up to a very confused picture in terms of the philosophy of science. IR has struggled to incorporate an increasingly diverse set of positions into its theoretical landscape. In general, the discipline has attempted to maintain an unsophisticated and outdated two-category framework based on the science/anti-science issue.…Currently there are three continuums that the discipline seems to consider line up in opposition to each other. The first of these is the explaining/understanding divide (Hollis & Smith, 1990). The second is the positivism/post-positivism divide (Lapid, 1989; Sylvester, 1993). The third is Keohane's distinction between rationalism and reflectivism (Keohane, 1989). The newly emerging constructivism claims ‘the middle ground’ in between. (Adler, 1997; Price & Reus-Smit, 1998; Wendt, 1999)

Merger review policy among countries varies according to the weight given to consumers relative to producers. When both receive their full welfare weight it is said that the efficiencies defense is fully realized. No well-developed economic rationale has been given for giving more weight to consumers. Such a rationale is given here by considering equity and efficiency both as goods for which there is a willingness to pay. The willingness to pay approach not only provides a rationale for giving consumers greater weight as with, e.g. a price standard, but also shows how in principle the weight is to be derived. The merger of Superior Propane and ICG Propane in Canada raises issues of the tradeoff of equity and efficiency. The willingness to pay approach is applied to this merger as an illustration.

This research examines the effects of health, location, and other factors on receipt of wage income for young heads of households, aged 19 to 25, who lived in HUD-assisted housing and in other rental housing in 2011.

This chapter reports results of analyses of the 2011 American Housing Survey, merged with HUD administrative records, available as a public-use file at the U.S. Census Bureau.

Nineteen percent of young householders in assisted housing and 8% in other rental housing reported less than good health or a disability. Nearly two-thirds of young householders in assisted housing reported receipt of earned income. For respondents in assisted housing who reported good health and no disabilities, logistic regression models suggest that educational attainment beyond a high school diploma, more than one adult in the household, and living in metropolitan areas in the Midwest or West census regions were positively and statistically significant for receipt of earned income. For respondents in both assisted and other rental housing who reported less than good health and/or disabilities, residence in assisted housing or educational attainment beyond a high school diploma were positively associated with receipt of earned income, while residence in the metropolitan South lowered the odds of receipt of earned income.

Success of self-sufficiency programs will depend on accommodating the imperatives created by health, disability, and structural impediments created by a market economy.

This is the first analysis of health/disability and other barriers to paid employment that accurately identifies a nationally representative sample of young Millennials in HUD-assisted and other rental housing.