Equitable Growth’s new working paper series

Tomorrow, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth will launch its new working paper series. The new series will feature work-in-progress from our grantees, our in-house researchers, and other scholars in our network whose research investigates the relationship between inequality and economic growth.

The inaugural release of working papers includes three excellent papers. The first, by Julien Lafortune and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University, was funded through our competitive grants program. Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach study the effects of school finance reform on the distribution of school spending and on student achievement.

The second paper, by Bill Lester of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also received support from our grants program. Lester compares labor market outcomes in San Francisco, which has probably the highest level of labor standards in the country, including a high minimum wage, a health insurance requirement, and paid sick days, with outcomes in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where standards are much lower.

The final paper, by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Equitable Growth’s Ben Zipperer, uses new econometric techniques to estimate the effects of higher minimum wages on employment.

As with all working papers, the research reported here is not yet complete. We hope that the publication of this work-in-progress will promote broader discussion of the issues studied as well as generate feedback that will be useful as researchers prepare their work for final publication.