TY  - JOUR
AU  - Card,David
AU  - Michalopoulos,Charles
AU  - Robins,Philip K.
TI  - The Limits to Wage Growth: Measuring the Growth Rate of Wages For Recent Welfare Leavers
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8444
PY  - 2001
Y2  - August 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8444
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8444.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Card
Department of Economics
549 Evans Hall, #3880
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-3880
Tel: 510/642-5222
Fax: 510/643-7042
E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu

Charles Michalopoulos
E-Mail: charles.michalopoulos@mdrc.org

Philip K. Robins
E-Mail: probins@miami.edu
AB  - We study the rate of wage growth among welfare leavers in the Self Sufficiency Program (SSP), an experimental earnings subsidy offered to long-term welfare recipients in Canada.  Single parents who started working in response to the SSP incentive are younger, less educated, and have more young children than those who would have been working regardless of the program.  They also earn relatively low wages in their first few months of work: typically within $1 of the minimum wage.   Despite these differences, their rate of  wage growth is similar to other welfare leavers.  We estimate that people who were induced to work by SSP experienced real wage growth of about 2.5 - 3 percent per year - a rate consistent with conventional measures of the return to experience for similar workers.
ER  -