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...

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 spatially differential effects of a nationally uniform minimum wage that was introduced in Germany in 2015. To this end, we use a micro data set covering the universe of employed and unemployed individuals in Germany from 2011 to 2016 and a difference‐in‐differences based...

This paper uses administrative employer-employee data to uncover the effects of a large payroll tax reduction for minimum-wage workers in France. Exploiting the change in labor costs both at the job level and at the firm level, I find that the policy spurred an additional 13 percentage points...

Using data from the 2006 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes how a minimum wage affects employment, wage inequality, public expenditures, and aggregate income in the low-wage sector. It is shown that a statutory minimum wage of EUR 7.50 per hour would cost...

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information. -- minimum wages ; unemployment ; asymmetric...

Do minimum wages reduce in-work-poverty and wage inequality? Or can alternative policies do better? We evaluate theses issues for the exemplary case of Germany that suffers from high unemployment among low-skilled workers and rising wage dispersion at the bottom of the wage distribution. We...

I discuss the econometrics and the economics of past research on the effects of minimum wages on employment in the United States. My intent is to try to identify key questions raised in the recent literature, and some from the earlier literature, which I think hold the most promise for...

This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. We cluster 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimate the trade elasticity for the different clusters. We then use these elasticities in a series...

Japan and India signed the much-awaited Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) on 16th February 2011. The CEPA will eliminate tariff on goods that account for 94% of their two way trade over ten years and will boost bilateral trade and investment. Indian exports which were subject...