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 examines how closely the minimum wage has been set to the most popularly stated goals of minimum-wage policy. I first estimate these goals: the minimum-wage rate at which the relevant labor demand is unitary elastic—maximizing the total earnings of minimum-wage workers (about $5.35)—and the level that would lift a typical minimum-wage worker’s family out of poverty (about $5.17). I c...

This paper argues how an increase in minimum wage affects employment, consumption, and social welfare with dynamic general equilibrium model without market frictions. The study demonstrates that a minimum wage hike reduces an actual unemployment rate and has positive effects on an employment rate under the demand-shortage economy whereas they do not under a non-demand shortage economy. The stud...

Union Wages and the Minimum Wage Henry S. Farber Massachusetts Institute of Technology It is argued that a change in the minimum wage may affect the outcomes of collective bargaining through its effect on a hypothetical "reference wage" which the union rank-and-file use as a basis of comparison in formulating their wage demand. It is further argued that the importance of the minimum wage in the...

A Menu of Minimum Wage Variables for Evaluating Wages and Employment Effects: Evidence from Brazil The international literature on minimum wage greatly lacks empirical evidence from developing countries. Brazil’s minimum wage policy is a distinctive and central feature of the Brazilian economy. Not only are increases in the minimum wage large and frequent but the minimum wage has also been used...