The Low Pay Commission is the institution created in 1997 to introduce Britain’s first National Minimum Wage. The paper places the Commission in historical perspective and provides a summary assessment of the initial impact of the Minimum Wage. It describes and analyses the development of the...

A survey of 1800 small and medium sized businesses is used to shed light on the number of workers covered by minimum wage legislation in Australia. Estimates are obtained and reported of the employment effects of changing the way in which minimum wages are set in Australia.

Over the last two decades, high – and, in some countries, rising – rates of low-wage work have emerged as a major political concern. If low-wage jobs act as a stepping stone to higher-paying work, then even a relatively high share of low-wage work may not be a serious social problem. If,...

The employment effect of the minimum wage is one of the most studied topics in all of economics. This report examines the most recent wave of this research – roughly since 2000 – to determine the best current estimates of the impact of increases in the minimum wage on the employment...

Most of the discussion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has focused on the extent to which it has extended health insurance coverage to the formerly uninsured. This is certainly an important aspect of the law. However by allowing people to buy insurance through the exchanges and extending...

In this paper, we introduce firm heterogeneity in the context of a model of non-compliance with minimum wage legislation. The introduction of heterogeneity in the ease with which firms can be monitored for non compliance allows us to show that non-compliance will persist in sectors which are...

In several countries governments fund childcare provision, but in many others it is privately funded as labour regulation mandates that firms have to provide childcare services. For this latter case, there is no empirical evidence on the effects generated by the financial burden of childcare...

Ontario faces a $19.7 billion unfunded liability at its Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) based on a fair-value accounting approach. In the report, the authors say the WSIB, which levies employer premiums intended to fund benefits for employees injured in the workplace, has a problem that...