There have been rising levels of inequality in the earnings distribution in some OECD countries (principally the English-speaking ones) together with stubbornly higher levels of unemployment in many others. Australia has shared in the rise in earnings inequality, but not to the degree that the...

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;...