The available minimum wage literature, which is mostly based on US evidence, is not very useful for analyzing developing countries, where the minimum wage affects many more workers and labor institutions and law enforcement differ in important ways. The main contribution of this paper is to present new empirical evidence on minimum wage effects for a key developing country, Brazil. Using a monthly household survey panel from 1982 to 2000 we find evidence of a strong wage compression effect for both the formal and informal sectors. Furthermore, we find no evidence of adverse employment effects in either sector.
It is well established in the literature that minimum wage increases compress the wage distribution. Firms respond to these higher labour costs by reducing employment, reducing profits, or raising prices. While there are hundreds of studies on the employment effect of the minimum wage, there are merely a handful of studies on its profit effects, and only a couple of dozen studies on its price effects. Furthermore, a comprehensive survey on minimum wage price effects is not available in the literature. Given the policy relevance of this neglected issue, in this paper we summarise and critically compare the available evidence on the effects of minimum wages on prices.
A number of recent empirical studies have found no evidence that the minimum wage adversely affects employment. Explanations for such non-negative estimates include new theoretical approaches, empirical identification and data issues. In this paper we examine the robustness of such estimates to concerns about bias arising from the simultaneous determination of employment and the minimum wage. We use a number of novel political variables as instruments to control for this source of endogeneity. We exploit the personal characteristics of the politicians voting on minimum wage bills, their voting behavior and their electoral process. Our main conclusion is that the weak relationship between minimum wages and employment does not appear to be driven by endogeneity.
Abstract:The UK was one of only three countries that granted free movement of workers to accession nationals following the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. The resulting migration inflow, which was substantially larger and faster than anticipated, arguably corresponds more closely to an exogenous supply shock than most migration shocks studied in the literature. We evaluate the impact of this migration inflow -one of the largest in British history -on the UK labour market. We use new monthly micro-level data and an empirical approach that investigates which of several particular labour markets in the UK -with varying degrees of natives' mobility and migrants' self-selectionmay have been affected. We found little evidence that the inflow of accession migrants contributed to a fall in wages or a rise in claimant unemployment in the UK between 2004 and 2006.
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