When Ecuador raised its monthly Unified Minimum Wage from $170 to $200 in 2008, it affected 35 percent of all private sector workers. We use this unexpected minimum wage hike under former president Rafael Correa to assess the labor market impacts of the minimum wage. We use an administrative...

We estimate the employment and labour force participation effects resulting from the abolition of the marital allowance - a 10 percent mandatory top-up in the Minimum Wage (MW) for married individuals - in Greece in November 2012. Using data from the Greek LFS over the period 2008:Q1-2016:Q1 we...

This paper incorporates a bubble term in the standard FTPL equation to explain why countries with persistently negative primary surpluses can have a positively valued currency and low inflation. It also provides an example with closed-form solutions in which idiosyncratic risk on capital returns...

The path breaking work of Card and Krueger (1993), showing higher minimum wage can increase employment turned the age-old conventional wisdom on its head. This paper demonstrates that this apparently paradoxical result is perfectly plausible in a competitive general equilibrium production...

We explain the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution despite economists' warnings that the MW is a "blunt instrument" for redistribution. To do so we build a model in which workers are heterogeneous in ability, and the government engages in redistribution through the public...

Common wisdom holds that the introduction of a non-binding minimum wage is irrelevant for actual wages and employment. Empirical and experimental research, however, has shown that the introduction of a minimum wage can raise even those wages that were already above the new minimum wage. In this...

This paper shows that increases in the minimum wage rate can have ambiguous effects on the working hours and welfare of employed workers in competitive labor markets. The reason is that employers may not comply with the minimum wage legislation and instead pay a lower subminimum wage rate. If...

The minimum wage rate has been introduced in many countries as a means of alleviating the poverty of the working poor. This paper shows, however, that an imperfectly enforced minimum wage rate causes small firms to face an upward-sloping labor supply schedule. Since this turns these firms into...

Climate change not only impacts production and market consumption, but also the relative scarcity of non-market goods, such as environmental amenities. We study fundamental drivers of the resulting relative price changes, their potential magnitude, and their implications for climate policy in...