A gender analysis of U.S. labor market policies for the working poor

Current anti-poverty policy proposals focus on welfare reform to the exclusion of reforming the low-wage labor market. In contrast, we compare two policy proposals aimed at low-wage labor markets: a national comparable worth policy and an increase in the minimum wage. With both policies we pay specific attention to their impact by gender. Our findings suggest that while both would reduce poverty among working women, the impact of a comparable worth policy on female poverty would be greater under most scenarios presented. It is estimated that an increase of 96 cents per hour in the national minimum wage would be necessary to equal the poverty reduction effect for women workers of a comparable worth policy which excludes small employers. Both policies decrease the incidence of povertylevel wages less among men, since roughly 60 percent of minimum wage workers are women. Additionally, not only would a national comparable worth policy improve the economic status of low-waged women workers, it would also narrow the gap between male and female poverty. While an increase in the minimum wage would also reduce this gap, comparable worth would virtually eliminate it.     

Minimum Wage: Does it Improve Welfare in Thailand?

We study the causal impact of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes, household consumption, inequality and poverty in Thailand by relying on policy variation in minimum wages over time across provinces. We find that minimum‐wage increases have a large and significant impact on the likelihood of working in the uncovered sector among workers with elementary education. However, the impact is very small and insignificant among other labor market groups. In contrast, the minimum wage has large positive effects on the formal sector wages of low‐earning workers, such as the young, elderly and low educated. Increases in the minimum wage are associated with reductions in household poverty and consumption inequality at the bottom half of the distribution.     

最低工资、就业弹性及就业效应研究

最低工资标准的提升对于就业的效应究竟是正是负,目前理论界并没有一致的论证结果。本文首先从市场结构和企业应对措施两个角度,梳理了西方学界关于最低工资对就业影响的作用机理,然后建立一个涉及农民工、企业和政府三方的博弈模型,推导出行业就业弹性对劳动参与的关键作用,并利用全国各省市六个行业的面板数据进行了实证分析。本文的主要结论是,最低工资的实施标准按行业设置比目前按地区＂一刀切＂的模式更具科学性。     

Looking for the workforce: the elderly,discouraged workers,minorities, and students in the Baltic labour markets

This paper looks at the evolution of the labour markets in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania since the beginning of transition until 2003, with a particular focus on labour force participation. How did labour supply in the Baltic countries respond to changes in minimum wages, unemployment benefits and retirement regulation? Do the marked differences in labour market policies between the countries result in different patterns of participation? What are the obstacles to and driving forces of participation? We find that relative contribution of participation and demographic trends to the dynamics of the labour force varied substantially both over the years and across the three countries. Participation, in turn, has been shaped by sometimes complicated interactions between schooling decisions of the youth, retirement, policy changes, and external shocks. Resulting differences in trends and patterns are quite substantial, indicating that there is a room for increasing participation in each of the countries. Panel data analysis of determinants of participation and discouragement based on labour force survey data suggests that increasing after-tax real minimum wage has significant positive effects on participation and reduces discouragement in Lithuania. In Estonia, by contrast, a positive effect of minimum wage on participation is found only for teenagers of both genders and for young males. We do not find any evidence that partner’s wage has a negative effect on participation. Ethnic minorities, especially females, in all three Baltic countries are less likely to be in the labour force, other things equal.     

劳动力异质性与中国最低工资标准就业效应分析

最低工资是当今世界各国广泛应用的经济政策,也是经济学家关心的议题。我国的最低工资标准偏低,且执行程度欠佳,所以我国的最低工资覆盖情况实际上符合部分覆盖的假设。同时由于我国劳动力的异质性以及最低工资制度的实施,导致未覆盖部门的低技能劳动力就业增多,而覆盖部门的高技能劳动力就业比例增多,总的就业效应方向并不明确。     

Cash Transfers to the Poor and the Labor Market: An Equilibrium Analysis

This paper studies the effects of cash transfers to the poor on the labor market. This is investigated in a matching model with endogenous labor market participation and job destruction. Depending on their productivity, workers might want to stay in the job, become unemployed, or leave the labor market; in addition, workers out of the labor force might decide to search for a job. Cash transfers are introduced to all agents with income below a given level. Two qualitative results are found: (i) The size of cash transfers has a negative effect on the employment rate, but an ambiguous effect on the unemployment rate; and (ii) the coverage of this welfare program has a positive effect on the employment rate, and an ambiguous effect on the unemployment rate. The numerical simulations also show that: (i) if the government target is to reduce inequality and poverty, the more efficient policy is to increase the level of benefits instead of increasing the eligibility of the program; (ii) compared with a welfare program that condition eligibility to labor market participation, the “unconditional” cash transfer program has a stronger impact on inequality and poverty, but with a reduction in labor market participation and output.     

The effect of minimum wage on poverty

To the best of my knowledge, the minimum wage's influence on poverty in Russia has never been investigated. Russian data provide a unique opportunity for studying the effects of the minimum wage on poverty, given significant increases in the minimum wage in recent years, almost complete coverage, and a high representation of full-time workers in poor households. This article examines the effect of the minimum wage on the incidence of poverty and the transitions into and out of poverty in Russia using data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE) from 2006 to 2011. The results indicate that the minimum wage in Russia had moderate poverty-reducing effects.     

An Efficiency Enhancing Minimum Wage

We consider an economy with a tax on all labor earnings. We discover that a slightly binding minimum wage on one sector can enhance efficiency. The minimum wage attracts high‐reservation wage workers into the minimum‐wage sector. If the labor demand curve in the free sector is quite flat, the vast majority of workers displaced by the minimum wage find employment in the free sector, raising aggregate employment. This displacement of workers by the only slightly binding minimum wage has negligible effects on efficiency. So efficiency and tax revenue rise as the minimum wage pulls labor out of untaxed leisure, where too much of the labor force is lurking, into taxed work.     

Sources of inequality in selected MENA countries

The paper deals with income inequality in the selected MENA countries focusing on the dynamics of domestic wage differentiations. The main aim is to identify the sources of inequalities. GDP per capita, share of manufacturing sector, urban share of population, gender participation in the labor force, education and openness may be possible factors. The paper analyzes pay inequalities using a panel regression model where the Theil index is used as the dependent variable. The results show that GDP per capita and female labor force participation have positive (increasing) effects, and openness has a negative (decreasing) effect on pay inequalities in these countries.     

The Redistributive Effects of a Minimum Wage Increase in New Zealand: A Microsimulation Analysis

This paper examines the potential effects on inequality and poverty of a minimum wage increase, based on a microsimulation model that captures the details of household composition and the income tax and welfare benefit system and allows for labour supply responses. Results suggest that, largely due to the composition of household incomes, a policy of increasing the minimum wage has a relatively small effect on the inequality of income per adult equivalent person, and a money metric utility measure, using several inequality indices. Hence, the minimum wage policy does not appear to be particularly well targeted, largely due to many low wage earners being secondary earners in higher income households, while many low income households have no wage earners at all. These results are reinforced when allowing for wage spillovers further up the wage distribution. Nevertheless, a minimum wage increase can have a more substantial effect on some poverty measures for sole parents in employment.     

最低工资标准提升的就业效应——一个基于自然实验的经验研究

本文以最低工资标准提升作为自然实验,应用回归调整的差中差方法分析了最低工资标准提升对青年和中年低技能劳动力就业的影响。研究结果表明,最低工资标准提升对低技能群体中的男性和青年女性的就业没有产生显著影响;但对低技能群体中的中年女性就业却产生显著的消极影响,且最低工资标准提升幅度越大,对就业的消极影响越大。因此,政府适当的提升最低工资标准将有助于低技能劳动力整体工资水平的增长。     

LABOR SUPPLY FACTORS AND ECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS

We propose a new Vector Autoregressive identification scheme that enables us to disentangle labor supply shocks from wage bargaining shocks. Identification is achieved by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate to the two shocks. According to our analysis on United States data over the period 1985–2014, labor supply shocks and wage bargaining shocks are important drivers of output and unemployment both in the short run and in the long run. These results suggest that identification strategies used in estimated new Keynesian models to disentangle labor market shocks may be misguided.     

Impact of remittances on male and female labor force participation patterns in Africa: Quasi‐experimental evidence from Ghana

In this paper, we examine how remittances, an outcome of labor mobility, affect labor market activities in Ghana using detailed household and individual‐level data. This is important, considering the extensive literature that has documented the remittance–poverty reduction nexus. First, we find a strong negative association between household remittance‐receiving status and individual labor supply decisions using instrumental variable estimation techniques. Second, we find the depressing effect of remittances on labor supply decisions to be much stronger in rural areas. Rural women who reside in remittance‐receiving households are less likely to be in the labor force compared with those who do not reside in such households. Remittances have very little impact on labor supply decisions in urban areas. Our findings support that remittances can exacerbate long‐term poverty reduction in rural areas through lower labor force participation, and as such rural‐based and gender‐based interventions may be needed to help redirect remittance income.     

Expected work experience and the gender wage gap: A new human capital measure

Work experience is a key variable in earnings function estimates and wage gap decompositions. Because data on actual work experience are rare, studies commonly use proxies, such as potential experience. But potential experience is identical for all individuals of the same age and level of education, so it ignores labor market intermittency because of childbirth and child rearing—a critical omission when analyzing gender differences in earnings. This paper constructs a better proxy: expected work experience, which is the sum of the annual probabilities that an individual worked in the past. This measure can be generated using commonly available data on labor force participation rates by age and gender to gauge the probability of past work. Applying the measure to labor force survey data from the Philippines shows that conventional proxies underestimate the contribution of gender differences in work experience in explaining the gender wage gap.     

Child labor and the minimum wage: Evidence from India

This study examines how changes in the minimum wage affect child labor in India. The analysis uses repeated cross sections of India's NSSO employment data from 1983 to 2008 merged with data on state-level minimum wage rates. Theoretically, the impact of the minimum wage on child work could go either way, so empirical evidence from a country with high rates of child labor and a myriad of minimum wage laws across states and industries helps to lessen the ambiguity. Results indicate that regardless of gender, in urban areas, a higher minimum wage reduces child labor in household work. In rural areas a similar result applies for girls while household labor does rise for boys. The minimum wage has virtually no impact on child work outside of the home across urban and rural areas.     

Migration and urban poverty and inequality in China

Using data from recent surveys of migrants and local residents in ten cities in 2005, this paper examines how migration influences measurements of urban poverty and inequality in China, and also compares how other indicators of well-being differ for migrants and local residents. Contrary to previous studies that report that the income poverty rate of migrant households is 1.5 times that of local resident households, we find relatively small differences in the poverty rates of migrants and local residents. Although the hourly wages of migrants are much lower than those of local residents, migrant workers work longer hours and have lower dependency ratios and higher labor force participation rates. Including migrants increases somewhat measures of urban income inequality. Significant differences between migrants and local residents are found for non-income welfare indicators such as housing conditions and access to social insurance programs.     

Skilled-unskilled wage inequality and unemployment: A general equilibrium analysis

The paper develops a static three sector competitive general equilibrium model of a small open economy in which skilled labor is mobile between a traded good sector and the non-traded good sector and unskilled labor is specific to another traded good sector. Capital is perfectly mobile among all these three sectors. We introduce involuntary unemployment equilibrium in both the labor markets and explain unemployment using efficiency wage hypothesis. We examine the effects of change in different factor endowments and prices of traded goods on the unemployment rates and on the skilled-unskilled relative wage. Also, we introduce Gini-Coefficient of wage income distribution as a measure of wage income inequality; and show that a comparative static effect may force the skilled-unskilled relative wage and the Gini-Coefficient of wage income distribution to move in opposite directions in the presence of unemployment.     

Gender Inequality and Trade*

The paper empirically explores the international linkages between gender inequality and trade flows of a sample of 92 developed and developing countries. The focus is on comparative advantage in labor‐intensive manufactured goods. The results indicate that gender wage inequality is positively associated with comparative advantage in labor‐intensive goods, i.e. countries with a larger gender wage gap have higher exports of these goods. Also, gender inequality in labor force activity rates and educational attainment rates are negatively linked with comparative advantage in labor‐intensive commodities.     

Doing it all: Women’s employment and reproductive work in Tajikistan

Central Asia has low labor force participation rates for women, despite high levels of poverty in the non-oil producing countries. Female labor force participation is related to competing uses for women’s time, especially in a context of poor infrastructure and limited availability of purchased replacements for household labor. We examine factors affecting women’s participation in employment and reproductive household work in Tajikistan, drawing on the 2003 Tajikistan Living Standards Survey. We incorporate specific conditions in Central Asia, including the prevalence of extended family households, norms about how women share household work, an absence of market substitutes for caring and reproductive labor, employment in family enterprises and poor infrastructure, especially in rural areas. We estimate the system using a Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) approach. We find that few individual and household characteristics are related to time in employment. Time in noncare reproductive work decreases if a woman receives direct remuneration for her employment (compared to working in a family farm or enterprise but receiving no direct remuneration), but increases if the woman has less access to infrastructure. Rural women spend more time in both employment and non-care reproductive work than urban women, but less time in care work. Lack of infrastructure may leave women with few choices with respect to non-care reproductive work, while overall levels of time poverty create pressures on care time.     

Crime rates and labor market opportunities in the Philippines: 1970–2008

The paper estimates the impact of labor market variables on crime in the Philippines using national-level time series and regional-level panel data. The evidence suggests that wage rate and labor force participation rate have stronger effect on crime than criminal deterrence variables.