Minimum Wages, Labor Market Institutions, and Female Employment

John Addison and Orgul Ozturk

No 278, Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies

Abstract: The authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation in 16 OECD countries, 1970-2008. Their treatment is motivated by Neumark and Wascher’s (2004) seminal cross-country study. Apart from the longer time interval examined, a major departure is the authors’ focus on prime-age females, a group often neglected in the minimum wage literature. Another is their deployment of time-varying policy and institutional regressors. The average effects they report are consistent with minimum wages causing material employment losses among the target group. Their secondary finding is that minimum wage increases are more associated with (reduced) participation rates than with elevated joblessness. Further, although the authors find common ground with Neumark and Wascher as regards the role of some individual labor market institutions and policies, they do not observe the same patterns in the institutional data. Specifically, prime-age females do not exhibit stronger employment losses in countries with the least regulated markets.

Keywords: Minimum wages; minimum wage institutions; prime-age females; disemployment; participation; unemployment; employment protection; labor standards; labor market policies; unions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 J38 J48 J58 J88 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/2099 First version, 2011 (application/pdf)

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:ihs:ihsesp:278

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Institute for Advanced Studies - Library, Josefstädterstr. 39, A-1080 Vienna, Austria

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies Josefstädterstr. 39, A-1080 Vienna, Austria. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Doris Szoncsitz ().