The paper estimates how wages respond to changes in regional unemployment using detailed Swedish micro data. The study is set in an economy with close to complete union coverage where real wages have grown continuously in all parts of the wage distribution for the past 15 years, and where the...

In August 2010 the Costa Rican government implemented a comprehensive program to increase compliance with legal minimum wages, the Campaign for Minimum Wages. To evaluate the impact of the Campaign, we use a regression discontinuity approach, which compares what happened to workers who before...

At first blush, most advances in labour demand were achieved by the late 1980s. Since then progress might appear to have stalled. We argue to the contrary that significant progress has been made in understanding labour market frictions and imperfections, and in modelling search behaviour and...

A striking feature of the past few decades has been the development of wage-determination models that assume that labour markets are imperfectly competitive. This paper discusses two such models (trade unions and oligopsony), although there are many more. It also asks if imperfectly competitive...

This paper evaluates the effects of the newly introduced German minimum wage on the distribution of hourly wages and hours worked. The study is based on the German Structure of Earnings Survey (GSES), the only large scale data set for Germany that includes information on hourly wages and hours...

Minimum wages alter the allocation of firm-idiosyncratic risk across workers. To establish this result, we focus on Italy, and leverage employer-employee data matched to firm balance sheets and hand-collected wage floors. We find a relatively larger pass-through of firm-specific labor-demand...

We estimate the effects of the introduction and subsequent increases of a substantial minimum wage in Germany's main construction industry on wage and employment growth rates. Using a regional dataset constructed from individual employment histories, we exploit the spatial dimension and border...

This paper documents a positive correlation within European labour markets between the proportion of full-time employees with earnings on the minimum wage and the extent of underreporting of earnings in the economy. Using a simple model of a competitive labour market, I show how this correlation...

A model of on-the-job training in the presence of a minimum wage is presented. This predicts that the minimum wage will have a negative effect on a worker's subsequent wage growth when the labour market is competitive but a U-shaped effect when it is not competitive. This prediction is then...

A recent paper by Meer and West argues that minimum wages reduce aggregate employment growth, and that this relationship is masked by looking at employment levels. I also find a negative association between minimum wages and aggregate employment growth using both the Business Dynamics Statistics...