It is well established in the literature that minimum wage increases compress the wage distribution. Firms respond to these higher labour costs by reducing employment, reducing profits, or raising prices. While there are hundreds of studies on the employment effect of the minimum wage, there are...

Using a new panel dataset for banks in eight West African countries, we explore the factors that exacerbate or alleviate excess liquidity, and the factors that promote or retard the rate of growth of banks’ assets. Loan default rates in the region are high, and variations in the rate impact on...

Several minimum wage variables have been suggested in the literature. Such a variety of variables makes it difficult to compare the associated estimates across studies. One problem is that these estimates are not always calibrated to represent the effect of a 10% increase in the minimum wage....

With small employment responses becoming prevalent in the literature, the minimum wage is just a program that transfers money from one group to another. If the poor are the consumers of minimum wage labour intensive goods, or if these goods represent a large proportion of their consumption...

The available minimum wage literature, which is mostly based on US evidence, is not very useful for analyzing developing countries, where the minimum wage affects many more workers and labor institutions and law enforcement differ in important ways. The main contribution of this paper is to...

A national minimum wage cannot explain variation in wages or employment across regions. Identification of the effect of the minimum wage separately from the effect of other variables on wages or employment requires regional variation. Many minimum wage variables with regional variation have been...

In this paper we use data from 17 African nations in order to investigate the hypothesis that monetary union – represented in this case by the CFA Franc Zone – augments the extent of macroeconomic integration in developing countries. The paper covers a number of dimensions of integration...

The few price effect studies available in the literature are grounded on the standard theory prediction that if employers do not respond to minimum wage increases by reducing employment or profits, they respond by raising prices. However, none of them explicitly discusses the theoretical model...

The West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) has a history of monetary stability and low inflation. Nevertheless, there is substantial variation in relative prices within some UEMOA countries, in particular in the price of food relative to other elements of the retail price index (IHPC)....

There is little empirical evidence on the effect of minimum wage increases on prices, particularly for developing countries. This paper estimates this effect using monthly Brazilian household and firm data over 18 years. As minimum wage increases in Brazil are large, frequent and affect a...