 Do Minimum Wages Lead to Job Losses? Evidence from OECD Countries on Low-Skilled and Youth EmploymentILR Review, 2018, vol. 71, issue 3, 647-675 Abstract: The author investigates effects of minimum wage rates on low-skilled, female low-skilled, and youth employment. The sample consists of 19 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1997 to 2013 for low-skilled workers and from 1983 to 2013 for young workers. Six different static or dynamic estimation approaches are applied on different versions of the specifications, controlling for up to quadratic time trends. The author further investigates the effects over the long run and over the business cycle as well as the effects of high minimum wages and of institutional complementarities. The findings provide little evidence of substantial disemployment effects for low-skilled, female low-skilled, or young workers. The estimated employment elasticities are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. The author then considers why his results on youth employment differ from those of Neumark and Wascher (2004), showing that they overstate precision and that small changes in their specifications lead to minimum wage effects close to zero. Keywords: minimum wage; low-skilled employment; youth employment; female employment; cross-section time-series data; OECD countries; labor market institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:71:y:2018:i:3:p:647-675 Access Statistics for this article More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School |
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