JEL code J
Labour and demographic economics
How are wages set, and why do outcomes differ by group?
Emerged 1798
Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that population, when unchecked, grows geometrically while subsistence grows only arithmetically, and made population a question economists had to answer.
An example
Card and Krueger (1994) compared fast-food jobs across the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border after a minimum-wage rise and found no job losses. It started a 30-year argument.