The median wage in Japan has fallen nominally since 1999 due to a severe recession, while the statutory minimum wage has steadily increased over the same period. We used large micro-data sets from two government surveys to investigate how the minimum wage has affected wage distribution under the...

Diverging economic inequality has become a common focus of economic debate in developed countries. In particular, the recent experience of Japan has started attracting international attention. We take advantage of a rich micro-level data set from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (1989-2003) to...

Wage increases, along with job tenure, are one of the most robust empirical regularities found in labor economics. Several theories explain these empirical regularities, and such theories offer sharp empirical predictions for the relation between productivity-tenure and wage-tenure profiles. The...

The way age-specific unemployment rates fluctuate over the business cycle differs significantly across countries. This paper examines the effect of labor-market institutions on the fluctuations of age-specific unemployment rates based on panel data of 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation...

Both human capital accumulation and Lazear contracts can explain the raising wage of salary/wage worker through job experience or tenure. To distinguish between these two effects, Lazear and Moore (1984) used self-employed workers’ wage growth to partial out the effect of human capital...

The widespread use of illicit substances by American teenagers has attracted the interest of both the public and academic researchers. Among the various factors that people believe influence youth substance use, peer effects are identified as a critical determinant; substance use is considered a...

Previous studies have found that self-employed workers with long business tenure earn less than other workers with similar characteristics. This difference in earnings can be explained by the compensating wage differential theory when self-employed jobs have attractive non-earnings aspects....