The national minimum wage is an important cornerstone of Government strategy aimed at providing employees with decent minimum standards and fairness in the workplace. It applies to nearly all workers and sets hourly rates below which pay must not be allowed to fall. It helps business by ensuring...

In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.5 per hour on the basis of a...

The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changesthat have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens withadequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on datafor 24 European Union countries,...

We study the impact of tax and minimum wage reforms on the incidence of informality. Togauge the incidence of informality, we use measures of the extent of tax evasion, the extentof minimum wage non-compliance, and the size of the informal workforce. Our approachallows us to examine (i) the...

Worker-level panel data are used to analyse the separate employment effects of increases in the social security taxes paid by employers and increases in the minimum wage in Turkey between 2002 and 2005. Variation over time and among low-wage workers in the ratio of total labour costs to the...

The economic impact of the 2007-2009 increases in the federal minimum wage (MW) isanalyzed using a sample of quick-service restaurants in Georgia and Alabama. Store-levelbiweekly payroll records for individual employees are used, allowing us to precisely measurethe MW compliance cost for each...

Using several unique data sets on wage agreements at both industry and firm levels inFrance, we document stylized facts on wage stickiness and the impact of wage-settinginstitutions on wage rigidity. First, the average duration of wages is a little less than one yearand around 10 percent of...

We measure labor market frictions using a strategy that bridges design-based and structuralapproaches: estimating an equilibrium search model using reduced-form minimum wageelasticities identified from border discontinuities and fitted with Bayesian and LIML methods.We begin by providing the...