Effects of Minimum Wages on Total Employment: Evidence from Cyprus

Pandelis Mitsis ()

Journal of Labor Research, 2015, vol. 36, issue 3, 318-345

Abstract: This study examines the relationship between total employment and the minimum wage in the special case where only a number of occupations are covered by the relevant legislation. Empirical evidence is provided by analysing time series data from Cyprus, the only country in the European Union where the minimum wage coverage is limited to a small number of occupations. After addressing the issues of stationarity, dynamic specification and endogeneity that most of the existing literature ignores, evidence is found of a significant and negative relationship between the minimum wage and total employment. This result is robust across variations in the sample period and the measure of the minimum wage. In the framework of recently developed search and matching models, the findings suggest the existence of significant spill-over effects to the occupations that are not covered by the minimum wage legislation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Minimum wage; Coverage; Employment effects; Time series models; J38; J48; E24; C32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12122-015-9205-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jlabre:v:36:y:2015:i:3:p:318-345

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12122

DOI: 10.1007/s12122-015-9205-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Labor Research is currently edited by Ozkan Eren

More articles in Journal of Labor Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().