I formulate measures of the effective minimum wage, based on broad definitions of the labor costs that face employers, and use these measures in reestimating some simple equations relating the relative employment of youths and adults to the U.S. minimum wage using aggregate data for 1954-78.I...

We estimate the minimum wage's effects on low-skilled workers' employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not....

I discuss the econometrics and the economics of past research on the effects of minimum wages on employment in the United States. My intent is to try to identify key questions raised in the recent literature, and some from the earlier literature, which I think hold the most promise for...

This paper describes an empirical study of the effects of federal minimum wage policy on aggregate employment, on the employment of various demographic groups, and on employment in low-wage industries. The analytical framework permits separate testing both for direct employment effects of the...

Policy researchers often have to estimate the future effect of imposing a policy in a particular location. There is often historical information on the effects of similar policies in other jurisdictions, but no information on the effects of the policy in the jurisdiction in question, and the...

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. To implement our approach, we estimate the effect of the minimum wage on the...

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct...

The employment and earnings effects of the minimum wage are estimated by parameterizing an hypothesized relationship between underlying market employment and wage relationships versus observed wage and employment distributions in the presence of a legislated minimum. If there had been no minimum...

Empirical investigation of employment effects of minimum wage legislation is a subject of continuing interest, judging by a growing number of studies. The older studies were concerned mainly with changes in employment in low-wage industries. In the more recent work, attention has shifted to...

This paper describes an empirical study of the effects of federal minimum wage policy on aggregate employment, on the employment of various demographic groups, and on employment in low-wage industries. The analytical framework permits separate testing both for direct employment effects of the...