What Does the Minimum Wage Do?

What Does the Minimum Wage Do?

Author: Dale Belman

Publisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute

Published: 2014-07-07

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0880994568

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Belman and Wolfson perform a meta-analysis on scores of published studies on the effects of the minimum wage to determine its impacts on employment, wages, poverty, and more.


The Fundamentals of Minimum Wage Fixing

The Fundamentals of Minimum Wage Fixing

Author: François Eyraud

Publisher: International Labour Organization

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9789221170143

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This manual draws on the ILO's comprehensive database containing the principal legal provisions and minimum wage fixing mechanisms in 100 countries. The minimum wage has had a long and turbulent history, and this study sheds light on its intricacies by providing a thorough overview of the institutions and practices in different countries. It outlines the main topics for debate concerning the effects of minimum wages on major social and economic variables such as employment, wage inequality, and poverty. The book considers the various procedures countries use for implementation, including the criteria employed to fix the minimum wage, and how they are linked to specific country objectives. It then measures the efficiency of the minimum wage, and focuses on its impact on employment as a major political issue. For the benefit of non-specialists, the validity of econometric models and their results are examined.


Minimum Wages

Minimum Wages

Author: David Neumark

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0262141027

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A comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labor market outcomes concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.


Global Wage Report 2020-21

Global Wage Report 2020-21

Author: INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE.

Publisher:

Published: 2020-12-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789220319482

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This ILO flagship report examines the evolution of real wages around the world, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The 2020-21 edition analyses the relationship of minimum wages and inequality, as well as the wage impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. The 2020-21 edition also reviews minimum wage systems across the world and identifies the conditions under which minimum wages can reduce inequality. The report presents comprehensive data on levels of minimum wages, their effectiveness, and the number and characteristics of workers paid at or below the minimum. The report highlights how adequate minimum wages, statutory or negotiated, can play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the crisis


Law and Employment

Law and Employment

Author: James J. Heckman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 0226322858

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Law and Employment analyzes the effects of regulation and deregulation on Latin American labor markets and presents empirically grounded studies of the costs of regulation. Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers. Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.


Myth and Measurement

Myth and Measurement

Author: David Card

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1400880874

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From David Card, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Alan Krueger, a provocative challenge to conventional wisdom about the minimum wage David Card and Alan B. Krueger have already made national news with their pathbreaking research on the minimum wage. Here they present a powerful new challenge to the conventional view that higher minimum wages reduce jobs for low-wage workers. In a work that has important implications for public policy as well as for the direction of economic research, the authors put standard economic theory to the test, using data from a series of recent episodes, including the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, the 1988 rise in California's minimum wage, and the 1990–91 increases in the federal minimum wage. In each case they present a battery of evidence showing that increases in the minimum wage lead to increases in pay, but no loss in jobs. A distinctive feature of Card and Krueger's research is the use of empirical methods borrowed from the natural sciences, including comparisons between the "treatment" and "control" groups formed when the minimum wage rises for some workers but not for others. In addition, the authors critically reexamine the previous literature on the minimum wage and find that it, too, lacks support for the claim that a higher minimum wage cuts jobs. Finally, the effects of the minimum wage on family earnings, poverty outcomes, and the stock market valuation of low-wage employers are documented. Overall, this book calls into question the standard model of the labor market that has dominated economists' thinking on the minimum wage. In addition, it will shift the terms of the debate on the minimum wage in Washington and in state legislatures throughout the country. With a new preface discussing new data, Myth and Measurement continues to shift the terms of the debate on the minimum wage.


Inequality in the Developing World

Inequality in the Developing World

Author: Carlos Gradín

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0198863969

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Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world's largest developing countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa.


Informality Trends and Cycles

Informality Trends and Cycles

Author: Norman Loayza

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 37

ISBN-13:

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This paper studies the trends and cycles of informal employment. It first presents a theoretical model where the size of informal employment is determined by the relative costs and benefits of informality and the distribution of workers' skills. In the long run, informal employment varies with the trends in these variables, and in the short run it reacts to accommodate transient shocks and to close the gap that separates it from its trend level. The paper then uses an error-correction framework to examine empirically informality's long- and short-run relationships. For this purpose, it uses country-level data at annual frequency for a sample of industrial and developing countries, with the share of self-employment in the labor force as the proxy for informal employment. The paper finds that, in the long run, informality is larger in countries that have lower GDP per capita and impose more costs to formal firms in the form of more rigid business regulations, less valuable police and judicial services, and weaker monitoring of informality. In the short run, informal employment is found to be counter-cyclical for the majority of countries, with the degree of counter-cyclicality being lower in countries with larger informal employment and better police and judicial services. Moreover, informal employment follows a stable, trend-reverting process. These results are robust to changes in the sample and to the influence of outliers, even when only developing countries are considered in the analysis.


Evidence on the Impact of Minimum Wage Laws in an Informal Sector

Evidence on the Impact of Minimum Wage Laws in an Informal Sector

Author: Taryn Dinkelman (Economics Department, University of the Witwatersrand (2000))

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13:

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What happens when a previously uncovered labor market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages and no statistically significant effects on employment on the intensive or extensive margins for domestic workers. These large, partial responses to the law are somewhat surprising, given the lack of monitoring and enforcement in this informal sector. We interpret these changes as evidence that strong external sanctions are not necessary for new labor legislation to have a significant impact on informal sectors of developing countries, at least in the short-run.