This paper examines the potential causes of the “ripple effect” of minimum wages. This wage spillover is thought to result from labor demand substitution: where the rising minimum increases the demand for more-skilled workers who become relatively inexpensive. However, the rising minimum also affects the relative wages across hedonically distinct occupations because it lowers compensating wage ...

The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Prices in Brazil There is very little empirical evidence on the effects of the minimum wage on prices in the international literature and none whatsoever for developing countries. This paper estimates the minimum wage price effect using monthly Brazilian household and firm data from 1982 to 2000 aggregated at a regional level. Empirical evidence on price effect...

Wage Distributions by Bargaining Regime: Linked Employer-Employee Data Evidence from Germany Using linked employer-employee data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey 2001, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of the wage structure in three wage-setting regimes prevalent in the German system of industrial relations. We analyze wage distributions for various labor market subgroups ...

A price rise signifies a fall in purchasing power, if there is no commensurate increase in income. Thus the pertinent question in the face of the phenomenal rise during the 1990s in the prices of the food articles, which account for a major chunk of the total expenditure of the poor, is whether there has been a corresponding increase in the incomes of the poor. The present paper is a modest att...

In this paper a simultaneous-equations model of firm closing and wage determination is developed in order to analyse how wages adjust to unfavorable shocks that raise the risk of displacement through firm closing, and to what extent a wage change affects the exit likelihood. The results show that the fear of job loss generates bargaining concessions instead of compensating differentials. A nove...

Bargained Wages, Wage Drift and the Design of the Wage Setting System This paper aims at answering the question: How does a typically 'European' bargaining system with collective bargaining, extension mechanisms and national minimum wage coexist with low unemployment rate and high wage flexibility? A unique data set on workers, firms and collective bargaining contracts in the Portuguese economy...

A general consensus has emerged that while the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) raised the pay of low wage workers it did little to harm their employment prospects. This is in contrast to the US and other countries where a debate over minimum wage effects still rages on. We re-examine the evidence on the introduction of the NMW and look at subsequent increases through the recession focusing on se...