Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality significantly changed over the last three decades, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries...

In a simulation-based study with data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we analyze the effects of the newly introduced statutory minimum wage of 8.50 Euro per working hour in Germany on the gender wage gap. In our first scenario where we abstain from employment effects, the pay...

In Deutschland wurde zum 1. Januar 2015 ein flächendeckender, gesetzlicher Mindestlohn von 8,50 Euro pro Stunde eingeführt. Kritiker des Mindestlohnes führen an, dass dieser zu erheblichen Beschäftigungsverlusten führen würde. Befürworter stellen dies in Frage und führen für den...

In a simulation-based study with data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we analyze the effects of the newly introduced statutory minimum wage of 8.50 Euro per working hour in Germany on the gender wage gap. In our first scenario where we abstain from employment effects, the pay...

Several empirical minimum wage studies have recently been published that simulate employment effects of a federal minimum wage in Germany. We disentangle various factors that explain the variation in previous simulation results. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the newly...

The statutory minimum wage has steadily increased for decades in Japan, while the median wage has fallen nominally since 1999 because of a severe recession. We use large micro-data sets from two government surveys to investigate how the minimum wage has affected the wage distribution under...

On the basis of a structural labor demand model employment effects of a minimum wage are estimated from a single cross-sectional wage distribution. The main contribution of the paper is to relax restrictive functional form assumptions of earlier papers by introducing more flexible...

In this paper employment effects of a sectoral minimum wage in the German construction sector are estimated from a single cross-sectional wage distribution using parametric and semi-parametric models. Parametric functional form assumptions seem too restrictive and lead to implausible results. We...

Several empirical minimum wage studies have recently been published that simulate employment effects of a federal minimum wage in Germany. We disentangle various factors that explain the variation in previous simulation results. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the newly...

A minimum wage increase could lead to adverse employment effects for certain sub-groups of minimum wage workers, while leaving others unaffected. This heterogeneity could be overlooked in studies that examine the overall population of minimum wage workers. In this paper, we test for...