Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/202756 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 12410
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We summarize recent research on the wage and employment effects of minimum wage laws in the U.S. and infer from non-U.S. studies of hours laws the likely effects of unchanging U.S. hours laws. Minimum wages in the U.S. have increasingly become a province of state governments, with the effective minimum wage now closely related to a state's wage near the lower end of its wage distribution. Original estimates demonstrate how the 45-year failure to increase the exempt earnings level for salaried workers under U.S. hours laws has raised hours of lower-earning salaried workers and reduced their weekly earnings. The overall conclusion from the literature and the original work is that wages and hours laws in the U.S. have produced impacts in the directions predicted by economic theory, but that these effects have been quite small.
Subjects: 
minimum wages
overtime
employment
hours
labor regulation
JEL: 
J23
J18
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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