Contrary to conventional wisdom, higher minimum wages may lead to greater levels of employment under perfect competition. We demonstrate this possibility in a simple generalequilibrium model with two goods produced by two factors and consumed by two representative households. Within our model,...

This paper provides theoretical support for the popular objection to offshoring, whereby firms at home employ services of labor located abroad. In the presence of unemployment, our analysis highlights welfare losses from offshoring—not only for the static case of a fixed stock of capital, but...

We add a minimum wage and hence involuntary unemployment to a conventional two-sector model of a perfectly competitive economy with optimal saving and endogenous growth. Our resulting model highlights the possible case of a backward-bending demand curve for labor, along which a hike in the...

This paper challenges the conventional academic view that international outsourcing is just another form of gainful trade. Contrary to this view, we show that labor-service outsourcing can reduce the high-wage country's welfare even when product-market trade is beneficial, within a model that...

This paper analyzes optimal taxation in an efficiency-wage economy with involuntary unemployment, thereby extending Chamley’s (1986) optimal-tax analysis of the standard full-employment case. For this purpose, we introduce optimal savings into the shirking-unemployment model of Shapiro and...

This paper obtains new results about absolute and comparative advantage, by introducing international technological differences into the three-sector Findlay-Komiya and two-sector Oniki-Uzawa-Stiglitz models ofopen-economy growth with optimal saving. For example, ifa country has the same...