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.

Is the correlation between income and educational attainment a result of
the payoff to investments in schooling? Since the experiment of randomly
selecting individuals to go to school cannot be performed, non-experimental
methods must be used to estimate the economic returns to schooling. This
paper reviews new studies that measure the effect of schooling on income (1)
by using comparisons of brothers, fathers and sons, and twins and (2) that
focus on natural experiments. These studies provide very credible evidence
that schooling does increase incomes and that earlier studies may have under-
estimated the role of schooling in determining incomes.

In this paper we study the role of covenants in franchise contracts that restrict the recruitment and hiring of employees from other units within the same franchise chain in suppressing competition for workers. Based on an analysis of 2016 Franchise Disclosure Documents, we find that "no- poaching of workers agreements" are included in a surprising 58 percent of major franchisors' contracts, including McDonald's, Burger King, Jiffy Lube and H&R Block. The implications of these no-poaching agreements for models of oligopsony are also discussed. No-poaching agreements are more common for franchises in low-wage and high-turnover industries.

In this paper we study the long-term labor market implications of school resource equalization
before Brown and school desegregation after Brown. For cohorts born in the South in the 1920s and
1930s, we find that racial disparities in measurable school characteristics had a substantial influence on
black males’ earnings and educational attainment measured in 1970, albeit one that was smaller in the
later cohorts. When we examine the income of male workers in 1990, we find that southern-born blacks
who finished their schooling just before effective desegregation occurred in the South fared poorly
compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind them in school by just a few years.

Arbitration systems are often used to resolve labor disputes
because on-going employment relationships are likely to contain specific
(human capital) investments. Recent research indicates that the ex ante
acceptability of arbitration to the parties must depend, in part, on the
unpredictability of the arbitrator's award. It is shown that the usual
selection process for arbitrators does imply that arbitrator decisions
should be statistically exchangeable (in the limit), and the evidence
available to date supports this hypothesis.