Does increasing incomes improve health? In 1999, the UK government implemented minimum wage legislation, increasing hourly wages to at least £3.60. This policy experiment created intervention and control groups that can be used to assess the effects of increasing wages on health. Longitudinal data were taken from the British Household Panel Survey. We compared the health effects of higher wages...

Adapting methods from complex system analysis, this paper analyzes the features of the complex relationship between wage inequality and the development and industrialization of a country. Development is understood as a combination of a monetary index, GDP per capita, and a recently introduced measure of a country's economic complexity: Fitness. Initially the paper looks at wage inequality on a ...

In this article, the bias in the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) hospital wage index that results from its failure to hold hospital occupation mix constant is examined. On average, the difference between the current PPS wage index and a fixed-occupation-mix Laspeyres index is small, approximately 2 percent. However, occupation-mix distortions are substantially larger for a small propo...

This paper estimates a simultaneous model of moderate and heavy drinking, smoking, and wages using a random sample of employed Canadian men. With all else in the system held constant, abstention from drinking and heavy drinking are associated with, respectively, large and small wage penalties relative to moderate drinking. Smoking is associated with a large wage penalty. If wages are excluded f...

The Employment Effects of Low-Wage Subsidies Low-wage subsidies are often proposed as a solution to the unemployment problem among the low skilled. Yet the empirical evidence on the effects of low-wage subsidies is surprisingly scarce. This paper examines the employment effects of a Finnish payroll tax subsidy scheme, which is targeted at the employers of older, full-time, low-wage workers. The...

In this paper we show how time-varying unemployment benefits can generate equilibrium wage dispersion in an economy in which identical firms post wages and homogeneous risk-averse workers search for acceptable offers. We model a two-tier unemployment benefit system that is similar to real-world unemployment insurance programs. We assume that the unemployed initially receive benefits at rate b. ...

The standard derivation of the accelerationist Phillips curve relates expected real wage innation to the unemployment rate and invokes a constant price markup and adaptive expectations to generate the accelerationist price innation formula. Blanchhower and Oswald (1994) argue that microeconomic evidence of a low autoregression coeecient in real wage regressions invalidates the macroeconomic Phi...

We examined data on hospital hourly wages and the prospective payment system (PPS) wage index from 1990 to 1997, to determine if incremental changes to the index have improved its precision and equity as a regional cost adjuster. The differential between average rural and urban PPS hourly wages has declined by almost one-fourth over the 8-year study period. Nearly one-half of the decrease is at...

the purpose of this study is to investigate the factors affecting the manufacturing industry wage among selected developing countries based on new economic geography theory. more specifically, we use a panel data model to study the spatial structure of wages in 136 countries for the period 1998-2007. the results indicate that this theory provides a good description of the spatial structure of w...