Using data on Wages Council coverage from the United Kingdom New Earnings Survey, the authors examine the impact of mandated minimum wages on wage dispersion and employment in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. They find evidence that a dramatic decline in the toughness of the regulation imposed...

This paper examines the structure of wages in a very specific labor market: care assistants in residential homes for the elderly on England's “sunshine coast.†This sector corresponds closely to economists' notion of what should be a competitive labor market, both because it has a...

A number of researchers have argued that men and women have different attitudes toward and behavioral responses to competition; that is, women are more likely to opt out of jobs in which performance pay is the norm and to under-perform in some competitive situations. Laboratory experiments...