This paper examines the impact of minimum wage legislation in developing countries where coverage is incomplete. Using a rich data set from Ghana, it estimates the extent to which a binding minimum wage alters employment in both the formal and informal sectors of the labor market. The data reveal that Ghana’s minimum wage policies during the 1970s and 1980s led to a reduction of formal sector j...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects of a national union, which coordinates the wage negotiations in different industries, in a small open economy, trading in imperfectly competitive world markets. Industry wage levels are determined as cooperative Nash bargaining solutions on the labor demand curve. If wage contracts affect industry output prices, a national union leads to wage modera...

We suggest that stabilizing the baseline income can make low-wage workers more tolerant towards high earners. present evidence of this attitude in UK by exploiting introduction National Minimum Wage (NMW), which institutionally sets a pay reducing risk losses and providing clear reference point for British at lower end distribution. Based on data from Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we show who ...

In this paper, we study the outcome of an unusually clean natural experiment--California’s large minimum wage increase of 1988. Two different approaches to evaluating the experiment result in the same conclusion: the textbook analysis of minimum wages holds true. In particular, we find that employment growth in California’s low-wage retail trade industry was slowed by the minimum wage increase....