The minimum wage has gained momentum among policymakers as a way to alleviate rising wage and income inequality. Much of the debate over this policy centers on whether raising the minimum wage causes job loss, as well as the potential magnitude of those losses. Recent research shows conflicting evidence on both sides of the issue. In general, the evidence suggests that it is appropriate to weig...

This paper re-examines gender wage differences, taking into account not only worker characteristics but also job characteristics. Consideration of a wide set of “job quality” indicators can explain a fraction of the wage gap that would otherwise be attributed to pure wage discrimination. In any case, the fraction of the wage gap that remains associated to differential rewards for identical fact...

The paper examines the role of collective bargaining systems as a determinant of the inter-industry wage structure. It compares wage patterns of six countries: Austria, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the U.S.. We use comparable wage regressions from micro cross-sections data to calculate inequality in pay across sectors. Our findings suggest the following: First, high (low) wage sectors in...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of a wage increase on Qat consumption for the Djiboutian mail household head using a static framework. In particular, by using a system of simultaneous of equations with Qat consumption and Wage as endogenous variables, the paper estimates whether a wage increase will affect Qat consumption. Our findings suggest that the impact of wage on Qat cons...

Using the UK Labour Force Survey, we study wage gaps for disabled men after the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act. We estimate wage gaps at the mean and at different quantiles of the wage distribution, and decompose them into the part explained by differences in workers’ and job characteristics, the part that can be ascribed to health-related reduced productivity, and a residual...

We exploit the introduction of minimum wages in the agricultural and domestic work sectors of South Africa to study how the structure of low-wage labor markets of a low-income country changes with the changes in policy. Even after the introduction of the minimum wage, we find widespread and persistent non-compliance. Our (lowerbound) estimate of the national level compliance rate in the agricul...

This paper demonstrates, contrary to what has been shown recently, that demand pressure, besides cost-pressure, matters both in the labor market and the market for goods in the determination of wage and price inflation. We consider and estimate both wage and price Phillips-curves for the U.S., using OLS and nonparametric estimation techniques. The finding is that on the whole wages are more fle...

Collective wage bargaining is an old, yet alien concept for Chinese enterprises. It is old because it was put forward as early as in the 1980s and formalized in the 1994 Labour Law. Nonetheless, collective wage bargaining was alien to most Chinese enterprises because according to the 1994 Labour Law the implementation of collective wage bargaining was voluntary and few enterprises carried it ou...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of em-ployment. We examine Sweden’s industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the same period. We relate U.S.-Swedish differences in the industry distribution and their evolution over...

English Deficiency and the Native-Immigrant Wage Gap We focus on the effect of English deficiency on the native-immigrant wage gap for male employees in the UK using the first wave of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey. We show that the wage gap is robust to controls for age, region of residence, educational attainment and ethnicity. However, English as Additional Language (EAL) is capable of...