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...

A filtered data sequence can be obtained by multiplying the Fourier ordinates of the data by the ordinates of the frequency response of the filter and by applying the inverse Fourier transform to carry the product back to the time domain. Using this technique, it is possible, within the...

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...

This paper shows how a frequency-selective filter that is applicable to short trended data sequences can be implemented via a frequency-domain approach. A filtered sequence can be obtained by multiplying the Fourier ordinates of the data by the ordinates of the frequency response of the filter...

An account is given of some techniques of linear filtering that can be used for extracting the business cycle from economic data sequences of limited duration. It is argued that there can be no definitive definition of the business cycle. Both the definition of the business cycle and the methods...

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...

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...

Alternative methods of trend extraction and of seasonal adjustment are described that operate in the time domain and in the frequency domain. The time-domain methods that are implemented in the TRAMO–SEATS and the STAMP programs are described and compared. An abbreviated time-domain method of...