Minimum wages decrease employment in competitive markets, but can increase it in monopsonistic markets so long as they do not exceed the marginal product of labour. We find evidence of non-monotonicity both by market structure and minimum wage level. Minimum wage hikes initially increase hours...

In a competitive model we ease the assumption that efficiency units of labour are the product of hours and workers. We show that a minimum wage may either increase or decrease hours per worker and the change will have the opposite sign to the slope of the equilibrium hours hourly wage locus....

We model a standard competitve labour market where firms choose combinations of workers and hours per worker to produce output. If one assumes that the scale of production has no impact on hours per worker, then the change in the number of workers and hours per worker resulting from a minimum...

Most minimum wage studies are identified on small, plentiful, and expected wage changes, spread out over time. A recent set of changes have instead been large, unexpected, and quick, following the "Fight for $ 15" movement. Alberta is the first state or province to have this $ 15 minimum wage,...

The Canadian labour market is currently emerging from a holding pattern with unusually high numbers in temporary (or "recall") unemployment, those "employed but absent from work" for unspecified reasons, or not in the labour force while waiting to be recalled. Two encouraging signs are evident....

This paper proposes an empirical approach to decompose the distributional effects of minimum wages into effects for workers moving out of employment, workers moving into employment, and workers continuing in employment. We estimate the effects of the minimum wage on the hazard rate for wages,...

Monopsonists suppress employment and wages so as to avoid matching higher wages to their existing employees. Minimum wage hikes force them to pay their existing employees more, reducing the marginal cost of hiring and increasing both wages and employment. However, once the minimum wage exceeds...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...