This study evaluates the treatment effect of the Matching Grant Program in the United States, a resettlement assistance program for officially admitted refugees with the aim of helping them gain early employment. The matching estimates of this study suggest that the program significantly increased the employment probability of its participants by 12 to 13 percentage points. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effect of the program is higher for specific sub-groups, such as younger refugees (under age 35), those with mid or high English proficiency, and Asian and European refugees. A variety of robustness checks as well as weighting estimates lend support to the main finding of this study.
The author investigates the different influences of labor shortage on wages in firms with or without collective bargaining agreements. In addition to training, technological solutions, and organizational flexibility, employers can also offer higher wages at a constant employment level to fill vacancies if the current payments are lower than the marginal revenue of the workers. Firms with collective bargaining agreements probably already pay wages according to marginal revenue or, in the case of rent sharing, above it, and the remuneration is probably also not adjusted. Using wage regressions with panel data for German establishments, this paper shows that collective bargaining and a lack of skilled workers can lead to higher wages. However, the latter only applies to firms that are not bound by collective agreements. Hence, wage differentials between these firms decrease, providing further explanation for a countercyclical development of the wage premium from the collective bargaining agreement.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12122-022-09334-1.
Various U.S. states and municipalities raised their mandated minimum wages between 2017 and 2019. In some areas, minimum wages became high enough to bind for more professional workers, such as lower paid staff at nursing facilities. We add to the small prior literature on the effects of minimum wages on nursing facility staffing using novel establishment-level data on daily hours worked; these data allow us to examine changes in staffing hours along margins previously unexplored in the minimum wage literature. We find no evidence that minimum wage increases reduced hours worked among lower-paid nurses in nursing facilities. In contrast, we find that increases in state and local minimum wages increased hours worked per resident day by nursing assistants; increases occurred for the average of all days throughout the month and on weekend days. We also find that a higher minimum wage increased the share of days in the month that facilities meet at least 75% of the minimum recommended levels of staffing for nursing assistants. These results lessen concerns that minimum wage hikes may reduce the quality of resident care at nursing facilities.