Belman and Wolfson perform a meta-analysis on scores of published studies on the effects of the minimum wage to determine its impacts on employment, wages, poverty, and more.

A comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labor market outcomes concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.

A guide to the continually evolving field of labour economics.

We reassess the effect of state and federal minimum wages on U.S. earnings inequality using two additional decades of data and far greater variation in minimum wages than was available to earlier studies. We argue that prior literature suffers from two sources of bias and propose an IV strategy to address both. We find that the minimum wage reduces inequality in the lower tail of the wage distribution (the 50/10 wage ratio), but the impacts are typically less than half as large as those reported elsewhere and are almost negligible for males. Nevertheless, the estimated effects extend to wage percentiles where the minimum is nominally non-binding, implying spillovers. However, we show that spillovers and measurement error (absent spillovers) have similar implications for the effect of the minimum on the shape of the lower tail of the measured wage distribution. With available precision, we cannot reject the hypothesis that estimated spillovers to non-binding percentiles are due to reporting artifacts. Accepting this null, the implied effect of the minimum wage on the actual wage distribution is smaller than the effect of the minimum wage on the measured wage distribution.

Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world's largest developing countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

This book makes an important contribution to the literature of public policy, political philosophy and political economy and the author argues that wage policy is an important component in the maintenance of democratic society.

One of the most troubling developments of the past two decades has been the dramatic rise in inequality among nations and within nations. This book examines the nature of this development in a variety of countries and contexts - China, Russia, Australia, Latin America, Italy - where the rise of inequality has not been studied as intensively as the US or UK. It also presents analyses of some potential causes and consequences of the rise in inequality.