What happens when a previously uncovered labour 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 for domestic workers and find no statistically significant effects on the intensive or...

Using several unique data sets on wage agreements at both the firm- and the industry-levels in France, we examine the impact of typical European wage-setting institutions on the form and the degree of wage rigidity. We highlight different stylized facts concerning wage stickiness. First, in...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all the growth in inequality in the bottom end, is due to...

The condition for when a price control increases consumer welfare in perfect competition is tighter than often realised. When demand is linear, a small restriction on price only increases consumer surplus if the elasticity of demand exceeds the elasticity of supply; with log-linear or...

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of seven aspects of rising inequality that are usually discussed separately: changes in labor’s share of income; inequality at the bottom of the income distribution, including labor mobility; skill-biased technical change; inequality among high incomes;...

This paper examines the effects on wages and employment of the minimum wage in agriculture in the United Kingdom during the interwar period. We find that the impact of regulation was to raise the wage for agricultural labourers by 13% when it was (re)introduced in 1924, by 15% in the late 1920s,...

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is hardly any evidence on their impact on firm performance. This is surprising: minimum wages appear to have a significant impact on wages, but only a limited...

Changes in legislation in mid-80s Portugal provide remarkable conditions for economic analysis, as the minimum wage increased very sharply for a very specific group of workers. Relying on a matched employer-employee panel dataset, we model gross job flows - accessions and separations - in...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers' union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labour markets. The individuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneous productivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, the government, which does not observe the...