In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers' union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

The paper estimates how wages respond to changes in regional unemployment using detailed Swedish micro data. The study is set in an economy with close to complete union coverage where real wages have grown continuously in all parts of the wage distribution for the past 15 years, and where the...

In August 2010 the Costa Rican government implemented a comprehensive program to increase compliance with legal minimum wages, the Campaign for Minimum Wages. To evaluate the impact of the Campaign, we use a regression discontinuity approach, which compares what happened to workers who before...

This paper combines two of the most central features of modern labor markets - immigrants and unions - to examine the role of worker power in shaping immigrant sorting across firms, and how that subsequently influences the performance of firms and the careers of incumbent workers. First, unions...

A striking feature of the past few decades has been the development of wage-determination models that assume that labour markets are imperfectly competitive. This paper discusses two such models (trade unions and oligopsony), although there are many more. It also asks if imperfectly competitive...

We analyze how wage setting institutions and job-security provisions interact on unemployment. The assumption that wages are renegotiated by mutual agreement only is introduced in a matching model with endogenous job destruction - la Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) in order to get wage profiles...

This paper analyses economists' support for the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, by examining the characteristics of almost 1000 economists who signed open letters either supporting or opposing the Bill prior to a Senate debate on the legislation. In contrast to previous work, which found that...

This paper investigates the degree of monopsony power of employers in different industries against the background of a statutory minimum wage introduction in Germany in January 2015. A semi-structural estimation approach is employed based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition. The...

For two different regulatory standards, we examine the optimal minimum wage in a competitive labour market when the government is uncertain about supply and demand. Solutions are related to underlying supply and demand conditions, and the extent of uncertainty and of rationing efficiency. We...

We examine worker effort as a potential margin of adjustment to a minimum wage hike using unique data on piece rate workers who perform a homogenous task and whose individual output is rigorously recorded. By employing a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the increase in Florida's...