Wages, School Quality, and Employment Demand

David Card and Alan B. Krueger have made substantial contributions to the field of Labor Economics. Their influential work focuses on policy-relevant issues and spans vast and important topics, including: unemployment, minimum wage, migration, measurement error, unions, wage differentials among various groups in the U.S., labor demand, social insurance, and technological change. Card and Krueger have also been extremely influential in econometrics methodology; they were at the forefront of employing an experimental approach in their research design and implementation. Both of these IZA prize winners have made significant methodological contributions on instrumental variable estimation, measurement error, regression discontinuity methods, and the use of natural experiments. This book provides an overview of their most important work and is divided two main parts: the first section focuses on school quality and the differences in wages across groups in the U.S.; the second part concentrates on the effect of changes in the minimum wage on employment and wage setting. In section introductions, Card and Krueger offer their insight into these two areas and discuss the historical context for their research.

David Card is Faculty Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his B.A. in 1978 at Queen’s University (Kingston) and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1983. From 1988 to 1992 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and from 1993 to 1997 co-editor of Econometrica.

Since 1987 Alan B. Kruger has held a joint appointment in the Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. He is also the Founding Director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Krueger has published widely on the economics of education, income dispersion, technological change, labor demand, social insurance, health economics, and environmental economics.