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...

Our novel approach to modeling monopolistic competition with heterogeneous consumers involves a space of characteristics of a differentiated good (consumers' ideal points), alike Hotelling (1929). Firms have heterogeneous costs à la Melitz (2003). In addition to price setting, each firm also...

This paper is concerned with cross-dependencies between endogenous market structure and tax policy. We extend the Mirrlees (1971) model of income taxation with a monopolistic competition framework with general additively separable consumer preferences. We show that price and variety distortions...

We consider a model of monopolistic competition with several heterogeneous sectors and endogenous labor supply. For low (high) values of the labor supply elasticity, we show that there is always a unique equilibrium. For medium values of the labor supply elasticity, the set of equilibria (if...

This paper develops a model that incorporates workers' fair wage preferences into a general equilibrium framework with monopolistic competition between heterogeneous firms à la Melitz (2003). By assuming that the wage considered to be fair by workers depends on the productivity and thus the...

Our novel approach to modeling monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms and consumers involves spatial product differentiation. Space can be interpreted either as a geographical space or as a space of characteristics of a differentiated good. In addition to price setting, each firm also...

This paper studies the market and welfare effects of income heterogeneity in monopolistically competitive product markets in the context of nonhomothetic preferences. In a closed economy, where richer individuals’ expenditures are less sensitive to price change compared to poorer ones’, a...

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...

We examine the profitability of cross-ownership in an oligopolistic industry where firms compete as Cournot rivals. We consider a symmetric cross-ownership structure in which a subset of k firms engage in cross-shareholding and each firm has an equal silent financial interest in the other firms,...