Using three large nationally-representative Malaysian Household Income Surveys from 1984, 1989 and 1997, the present paper examines inequality and determinants of earnings. During the period 1984–1997, Malaysia’s real per capita GDP increased by approximately 70 percent, the participation rates for both men and women went up among all age groups, and the average number of years of schooling inc...

This paper develops an efficiency wage model to highlight public policy for relieving unemployment in general equilibrium. This equilibrium entails unemployment because of either friction in the labor market or efficiency wages. For the purposes of relief, we present unemployment benefits and public employment programs, and we estimate labor demand and supply. Wage subsidies are also considered...

Heterogeneous Treatment and Self-Selection in a Wage Subsidy Experiment The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) is a research and demonstration project that offered a generous time-limited income supplement to randomly selected welfare applicants under two conditions. The first, the eligibility condition, required that they remain on welfare for at least twelve months. The second, the qualification ...

The gender wage gap varies across countries. For example, among OECD nations women in Australia, Belgium, Italy and Sweden earn 80% as much as males, whereas in Austria, Canada and Japan women earn about 60% as much as males. Current studies examining cross-country differences focus on the impact of labor market institutions such as minimum wage laws and nationwide collective bargaining. Howeve...

How inflation and unemployment are related in both the short run and long run is perhaps the key question in macroeconomics. This paper tests various price equations using quarterly U.S. data from 1952 to the present. Issues treated are the following. 1) Estimating price and wage equations in which wages affect prices and vice versa versus estimating “reduced form” price equations with no wage ...

For three years after developing countries open their stock markets to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of seven. No such increase occurs in a control group of developing countries that do not liberalize. The temporary increase in the growth rate of the real wage permanently drives up the level of avera...

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...

This paper develops a Bertrand price competition model with di erentiated goods in which export subsidies are compared to exchange rate depreciation as di erent government policies for promoting exports. National governments may wish to help domestic rms to expand market shares in pro table areas and might do this through either one of these two tools.Their e ects on equilibrium values are anal...