Abstract We investigate the wage, employment, and reallocation effects of introduction a nationwide minimum wage in Germany that affected 15% all employees. Based on identification designs exploit variation exposure across individuals local areas, we find raised wages but did not lower employment. It also led to low-wage workers from smaller larger, lower- higher-paying, less more productive es...

The wage of the 90th (richest) percentile of the wage distribution in Chile increased faster than the median wage and the wage of the 10th percentile between 1975 and 1990. By contrast, from 1990 onwards the wage of the 10th percentile and the median wage grew faster than the 90th percentile. This is one of many findings showing that wage inequality in Chile has been falling, first slowly, then...

Investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of China’s new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. Such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

This paper argues that a risk averse of workers after-tax reservation wage the difference between her reservation wage and the tax needed to fund the unemployment insurance system when liquidity constraint binds exists and it is unique. The optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wage to unemployment benefit shows the disincentive effect, i.e. higher unem...

This paper develops a discrete-time formalization of the circuit of capital model presented by Marx in Volume II of Capital Marx (1993) as a tool for aggregate economic analysis of capitalist economies. The discrete-time formalization closely follows and extends the continuous-time formalization in Foley (1982, 1986a). The discrete-time model is used to address two important issues of interest ...

We construct a dynamic panel error correction model of the Australian labour market using macroeconomic data across seven states and 27 years. Using panel cointegration tests, and fully modified OLS estimates, we test 3 competing long run hypotheses: real wage-productivity relation; real wage-marginal disutility relation; and the wage curve hypothesis. We find evidence to prefer the first. The ...

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...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of em-ployment. We examine Sweden’s industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the same period. We relate U.S.-Swedish differences in the industry distribution and their evolution over...