Poverty Effects of the Minimum Wage: The Role of Household Employment Composition

Gary Fields (), Baran Han and Ravi Kanbur

No 51147, Working Papers from Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management

Abstract: sector employment, uncovered sector employment, and unemployment. The impact of these labor market adjustments on absolute poverty will depend on how the pattern of employment composition changes within households and on how income is shared within households. An earlier paper (Fields and Kanbur, 2007) focused on the income-sharing dimension of the problem. The present paper focuses on household employment composition. For a particular structure of the labor market— one with good jobs, bad jobs, unemployment, and adult and youth workers— and with a particular model of how the sectoral patterns of employment are translated into household employment composition, we analyze the impact of minimum wages on a class of absolute poverty measures. The precise characterizations demonstrate the need for a nuanced appreciation of the impacts of a minimum wage increase, since they depend intricately on the values of key parameters (the poverty line, poverty aversion, labor demand elasticity, and the starting level of the minimum wage). Moreover, the relationship between poverty and the minimum wage is in general nonmonotonic, so that local effects can be quite different from the effects of large changes in the minimum wage.

Keywords: Financial Economics; Food Security and Poverty; Labor and Human Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2008-01-22
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:cudawp:51147

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.51147

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