Minimum wages, youth employment and spatial spillovers: New evidence for Spain

The effect of minimum wages increases on youth employment level has been extensively analysed, but recent contributions have highlighted the potential bias in these studies due to neglected spatial autocorrelation in the considered relationship. This paper contributes to this scarce literature by providing novel evidence for a country with very low interregional mobility. The aim is to see if the bias of neglecting spatial dependence acts in a similar direction than in the few studies for the United States and if this bias explains the low elasticity of youth employment to minimum wages in Spain compared to the international literature. Our results show the relevance of spatial spillovers in the Spanish regional labour markets, but after correcting for the bias, we do not find a significant negative elasticity of youth employment to minimum wages, with the only exception of those between 16 and 19 years old.

Measuring the exposure of Black, Asian and other ethnic groups to COVID-infected neighbourhoods in English towns and cities

Drawing on the work of The Doreen Lawrence Review—a report on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in the UK—this paper develops an index of exposure, measuring which ethnic groups have been most exposed to COVID-19 infected residential neighbourhoods during the first and second waves of the pandemic in England. The index is based on a Bayesian Poisson model with a random intercept in the linear predictor, allowing for extra-Poisson variation at neighbourhood and town/city scales. This permits within-city differences to be decoupled from broader regional trends in the disease. The research finds that members of ethnic minority groups can be living in areas with higher infection rates but also that the risk of exposure is distributed unevenly across these groups. Initially, in the first wave, the disease disproportionately affected Black residents but, as the pandemic has progressed, especially the Pakistani but also the Bangladeshi and Indian groups have had the highest exposure. This higher exposure of the Pakistani group is not straightforwardly a function of neighbourhood deprivation because it is present across a range of average house prices. We find evidence to support the view, expressed in The Doreen Lawrence Review, that it is linked to occupational and environmental exposure, particularly residential density but, having allowed for these factors, differences between the towns and cities remain.