About

Arindrajit Dube is the Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on labor economics, health economics, public finance, and political economy. His current areas of research include wage inequality, the importance of labor market competition, minimum wage effects on employment and inequality, the role of fairness concerns at the workplace, the interplay of behavioral biases and labor market power, the impact of unemployment benefits, and the role of firm wage policies in explaining the growth in inequality. Dube has also conducted research on employer health mandates, unions and collective bargaining, outsourcing and sub-contracting, gun laws and violence, and the capitalization of private information in stock prices. He received his B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Development Policy from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has previously held positions as a Visiting Professor at the MIT Department of Economics and Boston University's Questrom School of Business. Dube is a research associate at the NBER, a research fellow at IZA, and a research affiliate of the MIT Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work.

Research topics

• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Labour economics
• Political Science
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Labor Market Effects of California’s $20 Fast-Food Minimum Wage

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-05-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  California's AB 1228 raised the minimum wage for large fast-food chains to $20 per hour in April 2024-roughly 77 percent of the state's median hourly wage, the highest wage floor for fast-food workers in the U.S. Using QCEW data through 2025Q3, I estimate that the policy raised fast-food wages by about 7 percent.A conventional difference-in-differences yields an employment own-wage elasticity (OWE) of -0.19; synthetic difference-in-differences, which reweights controls to match California's pretreatment trajectory, shrinks the OWE to -0.04.Newly available QWI data through 2024Q4 yield estimates that are on average more positive.Across 32 QCEW and QWI specifications, the OWE ranges from -0.29 to +0.26, bracketing the median OWE of -0.02I compute across 26 post-2010 state minimum-wage events despite AB 1228's much larger bite.The QWI also reveals a sharp reduction in the separation rate, with ownwage elasticities of -1.7 to -4.2-several times the restaurant-sector benchmark in Dube, Lester, and Reich (2016) and consistent with a monopsonistic quit-reduction channel.Wage and separation-rate effects concentrate among large employers covered by AB 1228, with limited spillovers.The fall in separations also helps reconcile the somewhat more negative QCEW employment estimates.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for: Monopsony and Employer Mis-optimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-04-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication package containing data from the CPS and Amazon Mechanical Turk online experiments. We show patterns of bunching at round numbers in both datasets. We then run two experiments, randomizing wages around 10 cents and \$1.00, to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and fail to find any evidence of discontinuity in the labor supply function at round number, despite estimating a considerable degree of monopsony. <br>

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for: Monopsony and Employer Mis-optimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-04-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication package containing data from the CPS and Amazon Mechanical Turk online experiments. We show patterns of bunching at round numbers in both datasets. We then run two experiments, randomizing wages around 10 cents and \$1.00, to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and fail to find any evidence of discontinuity in the labor supply function at round number, despite estimating a considerable degree of monopsony. <br>

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Restaurant Employment, Minimum Wages, and Border Discontinuities

  Harvard Dataverse · 2025-09-25

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This is the replication package for "Restaurant Employment, Minimum Wages, and Border Discontinuities," accepted in 2025 by the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics.

  PublisherDOI

• A Local Projections Approach to Difference‐in‐Differences

  Journal of Applied Econometrics · 2025-07-19 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We propose a local projections (LPs)‐based difference‐in‐differences (DiD) approach that subsumes many of the recent solutions proposed in the literature to address possible biases arising from negative weighting. We combine LPs with a flexible “clean control” condition to define appropriate sets of treated and control units. Our proposed LP‐DiD estimator can be implemented with various weighting and normalization schemes for different target estimands, can be extended to include covariates or accommodate nonabsorbing treatment, and is simple and fast to implement. A simulation and two empirical applications demonstrate that the LP‐DiD estimator performs well in common applied settings.

  PublisherDOI

• Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-08-14 · 18 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  We use policy discontinuities at state borders to identify the effects of minimum wages on earnings and employment in restaurants and other low-wage sectors. Our approach generalizes the case study method by considering all local differences in minimum wage policies between 1990 and 2006. We compare all contiguous county pairs in the U.S. that straddle a state border and find no adverse employment effects. We show that traditional approaches that do not account for local economic conditions tend to produce spurious negative effects due to spatial heterogeneities in employment trends that are unrelated to minimum wage policies. Our findings are robust to allowing for long term effects of minimum wage changes.

  PublisherDOI

• Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? Accounting for Heterogeneity and Selectivity in State Panel Data

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-08-14

  book-chapter

  Traditional estimates of minimum wage effects include controls for state unemployment rates and state and year fixed-effects. Using CPS data on teens for the period 1990 – 2009, we show that such estimates fail to account for heterogeneous employment patterns that are correlated with selectivity among states with minimum wages. As a result, the estimates are often biased and vary with the source of identifying variation. Including controls for long-term growth differences among states and for heterogeneous economic shocks renders the employment and hours elasticities indistinguishable from zero and rules out any but small disemployment effects. Dynamic evidence further shows the nature of bias in traditional estimates, and it also rules out more negative long run effects. We do not find evidence of heterogeneous employment effects in different parts of the business cycle. We also consider predictable versus unpredictable changes in the minimum wage by looking at indexation of the minimum wage in some states.

  PublisherDOI

• The Economic Effects of a Citywide Minimum Wage

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-08-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Monopsony and Employer Misoptimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers

  American Economic Review · 2025-07-31 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk; we fail to find any evidence of discontinuity in the labor supply function at round numbers despite estimating a considerable degree of monopsony. We replicate these results in administrative worker-firm hourly wage data from Oregon. We can rule out inattention estimates found in the behavioral product market literature. We provide evidence that firms “misoptimize” wage setting. More monopsony requires less employer misoptimization to explain bunching. (JEL D22, J22, J31, J42)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Minimum Wage Shocks, Employment Flows, and Labor Market Frictions

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-08-14 · 8 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  We provide the first estimates of the effects of minimum wages on employment flows in the U.S. labor market, identifying the impact using policy discontinuities at state borders. We find that minimum wages have a sizable negative effect on employment flows but not stocks: separations and accessions fall among affected workers. We interpret our findings using a job-ladder model, in which minimum wage increases can reduce job-to-job transitions. We find that a standard calibration of the model generates predicted relative magnitudes of the employment stock and flow elasticities that are very close to our reduced-form estimates.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Attila Lindner

  University College London

  143 shared

• Suresh Naidu

  114 shared

• Ben Zipperer

  112 shared

• Doruk Cengiz

  107 shared

• Ethan Kaplan

  99 shared

• Michael Reich

  29 shared

• Siddharth Suri

  19 shared

• Jeff Jacobs

  Columbia University

  18 shared