OBJECTIVE To assess the affordability of a nutritious diet for households earning minimum wage in Nova Scotia. METHODS Food costing data were collected in 43 randomly selected grocery stores throughout NS in 2002 using the National Nutritious Food Basket (NNFB). To estimate the affordability of a nutritious diet for households earning minimum wage, average monthly costs for essential expenses...

Becker’s theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. In contrast, in noncompetitive labor markets, minimum wages tend to increase training of affected workers because they induce firms to train their unskilled employees. We provide new estimates...

In developing countries, the cost of antihypertensive medications is one of the principal limiting factors when trying to treat patients with high blood pressure. To determine the changes in cost (in US dollars) of these medications and in the percentage of the minimum wage needed to purchase them, two cost studies (1990 and 1996) done in Mexico were compared. The yearly cost of a treatment wit...

The purpose of this project is to analyze the impact of a minimum wage increase on the probability of being employed in the fast food industry in selected states and to test the hypothesis that this impact may be different in different regions of the United States. Our study uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) and focuses on four states divided in two groups. The first group includes Vermo...

In this paper we use important new training and wage data from the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the impact of the national minimum wage (introduced in April 1999) on the work-related training of low-wage workers. We use two ‘treatment groups’ for estimating the impact of the new minimum wage – those workers who explicitly stated they were affected by the new minimum and those work...

In spite of their positive influence on living standards and social inequality, it is commonly agreed that minimum wage laws reduce output because they produce unemployment. This paper suggests that minimum wage policy may be beneficial for a transitional economy in which labor is migrating from rural region to urban region and positive migrating costs occur. With a positive migrating cost, a b...

We exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1999 introduction of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to test for efficiency wage considerations in a low-wage sector, the UK residential care homes industry. Empirical results provide support to the wagesupervision trade-off prediction of the shirking model and suggest that the NMW may have operated as an efficiency wage. Our findings are in li...

We analyze the effect of the wage gap between regular and non-regular employment on a macroeconomy by using a Keynesian dynamic model. If the steady state equilibrium exhibits the stagnationist regime, the size of the reserve army effect affects the stability of the equilibrium. On the other hand, if the steady state equilibrium exhibits the exhilarationist regime, an increase in the wage gap d...