Michael R. Strain

Payday Holiday: How Households Fare After Payday Credit Bans

Payday loans are widely condemned as a ?predatory debt trap.? We test that claim by researching how households in Georgia and North Carolina have fared since those states banned payday loans in May 2004 and December 2005. Compared with households in all other states, households in Georgia have bounced more checks, complained more to the Federal Trade Commission about lenders and debt collectors, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection at a higher rate. North Carolina households have fared about the same. This negative correlation?reduced payday credit supply, increased credit problems?contradicts the debt trap critique of payday lending, but is consistent with the hypothesis that payday credit is preferable to substitutes such as the bounced-check ?protection? sold by credit unions and banks or loans from pawnshops.>

Downsizing: Job loss and effects on firms and workers

Job loss is painful. There are thousands of individual stories of workers who lose their jobs each year from all parts of the world. A great deal of work across the social sciences examines the causes and consequences of job loss. This chapter addresses a small part of that work and specifically focuses on the effects of job loss on workers (including the effects on subsequent wages and on health) and on the effects of job loss on companies (including short- and longer-run corporate performance). Other questions are also considered, such as whether firms are less committed to workers and workers less committed to firms than they were in the recent past. A variety of data sources are accessed for research on job loss, and consideration is given to the alternatives to job loss and the various public policies adopted in the United States and throughout the world. To begin, it should be noted that this chapter will not focus on other important issues related to job loss. It will not examine, in significant detail, the effects of international trade or tariffs. The chapter is also not about labor turnover that is initiated by the worker. Voluntary quits and separations are not discussed, nor are firings for cause or strictly for performance. The chapter examines instances where companies layoff employees (temporarily or permanently, although the focus is on the latter). It examines changes in the displacement of workers over time, reasons for the changes, and the effects on workers and companies. There is also a focus on policies, consideration being given as to whether there can be improvements to what is known and done about job loss, and a discussion of how other countries handle reductions in the demand for labor.

Has the Affordable Care Act increased part-time employment?

Abstract We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on part-time employment. Because the ACA’s employer health insurance mandate applies to individuals who work 30 or more hours per week, employers may try to avoid the mandate by cutting workers’ hours below the 30-hour threshold in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance. Although the employer mandate only went into effect in 2015, many observers have argued that forward-looking employers began to shift towards a part-time workforce well in advance of the mandate. To test this hypothesis, we examine relative shifts across two categories of part-time workers (25–29 hours and 31–35 hours). We find some evidence of a shift from the 31–35-hour category into the 25–29-hour category after the passage of ACA in March 2010. However, that shift is not more pronounced among low-wage workers or among workers in industries and occupations most likely to be affected by the mandate. Thus, there is little evidence that the ACA has caused the shift across hours categories, or led to an increase in part-time employment. However, the ACA could cause a shift towards part-time work in the future as the mandate takes effect.

DO MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES INFLUENCE WORKER HEALTH

This study investigates whether minimum wage increases impact worker health in the United States. We consider self-reported measures of general, mental, and physical health. We use data on lesser-skilled workers from the 1993 to 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey. Among men, we find no evidence that minimum wage increases improve health; instead, we find that such increases lead to worse health outcomes, particularly among unemployed men. We find both worsening general health and improved mental health following minimum wage increases among women. These findings broaden our understanding of the full impacts of minimum wage increases on lesser-skill workers. (JEL I1, I11, I18)

THE SHORT‐RUN EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF RECENT MINIMUM WAGE CHANGES: EVIDENCE FROM THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY

This paper presents early evidence on the employment effects of state minimum wage increases enacted between January 2013 and January 2015. As of 2015, we estimate that relatively large minimum wage increases (defined as those exceeding

Do volatile firms pay volatile earnings? Evidence from linked worker-firm data

1) reduced employment among low‐skilled population groups by just over 1 percentage point. Smaller minimum wage increases, as well as increases linked to inflation indexation provisions, appear to have had much smaller (and possibly positive) effects on employment over our sample period. The estimates thus raise the potential importance of nonlinearities in the minimum wages effects, which are consistent with standard models of the labor market. (JEL H11, J08, J23)

Dividends and Investment: Evidence of Heterogeneous Firm Behavior

ABSTRACT Despite the importance of earnings instability, little is known about its correlates or causes. This article seeks to better understand earnings instability by studying whether volatile firms pay volatile earnings and is the first to directly test the relationship using US linked employer–employee data. The article finds a positive and statistically significant relationship using within-firm variation. In addition, this article finds that lower earning workers are passed significantly more volatility from their employing firms than are higher earning workers.

Do Minimum Wage Increases Influence Worker Health

This article investigates the relationship between dividend payouts and corporate investment. We find significant heterogeneity in the relationship across firms—heterogeneity that helps reconcile competing results in the literature. Drawing on financial filing data from Compustat, we first broadly replicate the statistically significant negative relationship estimated by Auerbach and Hassett. We show that this relationship does not hold if the variation is restricted to within-firm only. Our null results suggest a relatively precise zero estimate for the mean firm. Next, we investigate heterogeneity in the relationship between dividends and investment. Using quantile regression methods, we find that this negative relationship is concentrated at the top of dividends distribution: only firms from the seventieth percentile and above exhibit a strongly negative relationship, and it is these firms that drive the negative estimates of pooled ordinary least square regressions reported in prior work.