We describe the economic history of the rise of the American minimum wage between 1910 and 1968. Each new FLSA amendment led to a new peak in the real purchasing power of the national minimum. Exemptions to the FLSA were progressively closed and the share of workers covered finally increased...

We examine a subminimum wage policy in the Finnish retail trade sector during 1993-1998 that allowed firms to pay subminimum wages to newly hired workers under the age of 25. This quasi-experiment enables us to compare wages for new hires in retail trade with those in similar industries. Despite...

Indonesian minimum wages were tripled in nominal terms, and doubled in real terms, in the first half of the 1990s. The author analyzes data from the 1993 labor force survey to evaluate the effects of this hike on wage earnings and wage employment. The results suggest that the minimum wage hike...

According to standard neoclassical theory a higher real wage will result in less employment and a lower rate of employment growth than a lower real wage and thus exogenous interventions in the labor market which increase real wage, such as minimum wage legislation and unionization, are said to...