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.

Over the last fifty years in the United States, unions have been in deep decline, while income and wealth inequality have grown. In this timely work, editors Richard Bales and Charlotte Garden - with a roster of thirty-five leading labor scholars - analyze these trends and show how they are linked. Designed to appeal to those being introduced to the field as well as experts seeking new insights, this book demonstrates how federal labor law is failing today's workers and disempowering unions; how union jobs pay better than nonunion jobs and help to increase the wages of even nonunion workers; and how, when union jobs vanish, the wage premium also vanishes. At the same time, the book offers a range of solutions, from the radical, such as a complete overhaul of federal labor law, to the incremental, including reforms that could be undertaken by federal agencies on their own.

This manual draws on the ILO's comprehensive database containing the principal legal provisions and minimum wage fixing mechanisms in 100 countries. The minimum wage has had a long and turbulent history, and this study sheds light on its intricacies by providing a thorough overview of the institutions and practices in different countries. It outlines the main topics for debate concerning the effects of minimum wages on major social and economic variables such as employment, wage inequality, and poverty. The book considers the various procedures countries use for implementation, including the criteria employed to fix the minimum wage, and how they are linked to specific country objectives. It then measures the efficiency of the minimum wage, and focuses on its impact on employment as a major political issue. For the benefit of non-specialists, the validity of econometric models and their results are examined.

Becker's theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers, because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. We show that when the assumption of perfectly competitive labor markets underlying this theory is relaxed, minimum wages can increase training of affected workers, by inducing firms to train their unskilled employees. More generally, a minimum wage increases training for constrained workers, while reducing it for those taking wage cuts to finance their training. We provide new estimates on the impact of the state and federal increases in the minimum wage between 1987 and 1992 of the training of low wage workers. We find no evidence that minimum wages reduce training. These results are consistent with our model, but difficult to reconcile with the standard theory of human capital.

A guide to the continually evolving field of labour economics.