We study the effects of domestic trade liberalization on labor markets in Botswana. South Africa is the dominant member of the Southern Africa Customs Union. As such, when South Africa liberalized trade in the 1990s, this induced large and plausibly exogenous tariff reductions for the other...

This paper provides evidence on a wide set of margins along which labor markets can adjust in response to increases in the minimum wage, including wages, hours, employment, and ultimately labor income, representing the central margins of adjustment that impact the economic well-being of workers...

Why is the employment effect of the minimum wage frequently found to be close to zero? Theory tells us that when wages are below marginal productivity, as with monopsony, employers are able to increase wages without laying off workers, but systematic evidence directly supporting this explanation...

We construct a panel data set on state-level minimum wage laws and economic conditions to reevaluate existing evidence on minimum wage effects on employment, most of which comes from time-series data. Our estimates of the elasticities of teen and young-adult employment-to-population ratios fall...

In Neumark and Wascher (1992), we present findings supporting the earlier consensus that minimum wages reduce employment for teens and young adults, with elasticities in the range -0.1 to -0.2. In addition, we find that subminimum wages moderate these disemployment effects. Card, Katz and...

This paper critically evaluates the contribution of labor economics and industrial relations research to our understanding of the impact of government labor market regulation. Recent theoretical and empirical literature is analyzed for four major policies: (a) workplace safety and health; (b)...

We argue in this paper that the focus on employment effects in recent studies of minimum wages ignores an important interaction between schooling, employment, and the minimum wage. To study these linkages, we estimate a conditional logit model of employment and enrollment outcomes for teenagers...

We re-examine recent cross-state evidence on the employment effect of the minimum wage. A re-evaluation of the data used in Neumark and Wascher's (1992) study of the minimum wage provides no support for their conclusion that the minimum wage has an adverse effect on teenage employment. Neumark...

We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects...

This paper presents a semiparametric procedure to analyze the effects of institutional and labor market factors on recent changes in the U.S. distribution of wages. The effects of these factors are estimated by applying kernel density methods to appropriately 'reweighted' samples. The procedure...