This paper estimates the impact of a more than 50 percent reduction in the minimum to average wage ratio in Mexico between 1970 and 1990 using panel data on minimum wages in thirty-two Mexican states. Minimum wages are found to have little effect on male employment but a negative employment...

When the Classical economists asserted the "impossibility of general overproduction," or what we now call Say's Law of Markets, they had in mind not periodic crises or business cycles but secular stagnation. Could the capitalist system absorb the constant increases in output without breakdown...

Palley (1995) recently built a job-hour model to provide us with a new view regarding the reason for unemployment and the positive employment effect of a minimum wage hike. This paper points out some difficulties with his explanation of his paper's findings and tries to provide an alternative...

Kaldor (1966) presented Verdoorn "law," having found a statistically significant relation between manufacturing productivity growth and manufacturing output growth using least squares on a small postwar sample that included Japanese data. Rowthorn (1975) claimed that the Verdoorn "law" fell...

This article is a short introduction to the 5 paper symposium on the European economic and monetary union appearing in this issue.

The convergence criteria that were introduced to allow the creation of a common currency, the EURO, in the European Union appear to sacrifice growth and employment for price stability. Yet, this conflict will have to be resolved if the European project is to succeed. This paper suggests that...

The meaning of Say's Law may seem an issue of little relevance to economists today. It would seem, on the face of it, of interest only to historians of economics. Whatever Say's Law might mean, the one thing we economists know, or at least think we know, is that it was comprehensively refuted by...

This paper studies the relationship between the labor market earnings of parents and their children, with a particular emphasis on education. We incorporate heterogeneity of levels of income in two ways: first, by examining the transmission mechanism of family income by grouping households...

Employment and wages of Puerto Rican men, a group acutely disadvantaged in the labor market are examined by focusing on the role of education and location in these changes. During the 1980s, Puerto Rican men benefited from educational upgrading, increasing returns to education, and wage growth...

Conventional economic wisdom holds that labor demand in the U.S. labor market has shifted over the past few decades against low-skilled workers, contributing to the plight of the working poor. This result, however, is sensitive to how we define unskilled workers. If they are defined in terms of...