Thanks to standardized work protocol and technology of McDonald’s restaurants, the hourly wage of McDonald’s Basic Crew enables wage comparisons under near-identical skill inputs and hedonic job conditions. McWages capture labor costs in entry-level jobs, while the Big Macs (earned) Per Hour (BMPH) index measures corresponding purchasing power of wages. We document large and growing geographical wage differences in standardized jobs using data covering most U.S. counties during 2016-2023. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no BMPH growth where minimum wages stayed constant, but the pandemic wage increase, which diminished the importance of minimum wages, was stronger in these areas.

The last decade has witnessed a number of remarkable developments in public policy, laws, and law enforcement that are associated with failures of competition in US labor markets. These include: (1) enforcement actions and antitrust lawsuits with regard to explicit conspiracies to suppress competition in labor markets; (2) the documentation and forced abolition of franchise contracts that include worker "no-poaching" clauses; (3) explicit discussion of the regulation of mergers that affect labor market competition; and (4) legislation and regulation that affect "non-compete' and "non-solicit" clauses in employment contracts. In addition, there have been some highly visible examples of explicit collusion in labor markets, and these have raised questions about the extent to which competition has been damaged. This paper covers one such alleged conspiracy to reduce labor market competition among workers in the studio animation industry.3

The last decade has witnessed a number of remarkable developments in public policy, laws and law enforcement that have been associated with failures of competition in US labour markets. These include: (1) enforcement actions and antitrust law suits regarding explicit conspiracies to suppress competition in labour markets; (2) the documentation and forced abolition of franchise contracts that include worker ‘no-poaching’ clauses; (3) explicit discussion of the regulation of mergers that affect labour market competition; and (4) legislation and regulation affecting ‘non-compete’ and ‘non-solicit’ clauses in employment contracts. In the following, I review the recent developments in public policy. I begin with a deconstruction of a particularly high-level conspiracy to reduce labour market competition in the High-Tech world.

Based on hourly wage rates from nearly all McDonald’s restaurants, and prices of the Big Mac sandwich, we find an elasticity of the wage with respect to the minimum wage of 0.7. This elasticity does not differ between affected and unaffected restaurants because many restaurants maintain a constant wage ‘premium’ above the minimum wage. Higher minimum wages are not associated with faster adoption of touch-screen ordering, and there is near-full price pass-through of minimum wages. Minimum wages lead to higher real wages (expressed in Big Macs per hour) that are one fifth lower than the corresponding increases in nominal wages.

The available estimates of the wage elasticity of male labor supply in the literature have varied between -0.2 and 0.2, implying that permanent wage increases have relatively small, poorly determined effects on labor supplied. The variation in existing estimates calls for a simple, natural experiment in which men can change their hours of work, and in which wages have been exogenously and permanently changed. We introduce a panel data set of taxi drivers who choose their own hours, and who experienced two exogenous permanent fare increases instituted by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. Our preferred estimate suggests that their elasticity of labor supply is about -0.2.

In 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads, but not on their urban interstate roads, from 55 mph to 65 mph for the first time in over a decade. Since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours they saved more than the fatalities incurred, this experiment provides a way to estimate an upper bound on the public’s willingness to trade off wealth for a change in the probability of death. We find that the 65 mph limit increased speeds by approximately 3.5% (i.e., 2 mph), and increased fatality rates by roughly 35%. In the 21 states that raised the speed limit and for whom we have complete data, the estimates suggest that about 125,000 hours were saved per lost life. Valuing the time saved at the average hourly wage implies that adopting states were willing to accept risks that resulted in a savings of $1.54 million (1997$) per fatality, with a sampling error that might be around one-third this value. Since this estimate is an upper bound of the value of a statistical life (VSL), we set out a simple structural model that is identified by variability across the states in the probability of the adoption of increased speed limits to recover the VSL. The empirical implementation of this model produces estimates of the VSL that are generally smaller than $1.54 million, but these estimates are very imprecise.