This paper explores the effect of mass privatization and the development of a new private sector in Russia on the wage and skill distributions in the private and state sectors of the economy. Two questions this paper seeks to answer are: (1) Does wage-setting behavior in privatized firms...

The classic dual economy models of developing countries hold minimum wages (among other institutions) accountable for persistent dualism. They note that applying or enforcing minimum wage laws in only one sector of the economy will create wage differentials which will not be eroded with labor...

Education’s role in determining worker incomes in China’s rapidly changing urban labor markets is investigated in this paper. Using worker data from a 1999-2000 urban enterprise survey, we examine the effects of education on the current earnings of continuously-employed urban workers,...

This paper investigates the effects of legal minimum wages on wages, employment, hours worked and monthly earnings among workers covered by minimum wage legislation as well as those for whom it does not apply (the uncovered sector) in Costa Rica. This country’s large uncovered sector and...

This paper contributes to our understanding of the impact of institutions on incomes of workers in developing countries by rigorously addressing the question as to whether changes in minimum wages can change the inequality of the distribution of earnings. More specifically, we analyze whether...

We present a new and simple empirical methodology to identify relative wage rigidity dynamics. The methodology is applied to data from the Polish Labour Force Survey for the period 1994 to 1998. We estimate ceteris paribus changes in relative wage and unemployment differentials for various...