To many economists the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution is puzzling, since the MW is considered a “blunt instrument” for redistribution. To delve deeper in this issue we build models in which workers are heterogeneous in ability. In the first model, the government does...

Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale, or if there are no differences in ability...

For the last fifty years, countries in Asia and elsewhere have witnessed a surge in aggregate savings per capita. Some empirical studies attribute this trend to the increases in life longevity of the populations of these countries. It has been argued that the rise in savings is short-run,...