The Effects of Minimum Wages on Employment: Theory and Evidence from the US

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to allow minimum wages to have the conventional negative impact on employment, but which also allows for the possibility of a neutral or a positive effect. The model structure is based on labour market frictions which give employers some degree of monopsony power. The formulated model has a number of empirical implications which we go on to test using data on industry-based minimum wages set by the UK Wages Councils between 1975 and 1990. Some strong results emerge: minimum wages significantly compress the distribution of earnings and, contrary to conventional economic wisdom but in line with several recent studies, do not have a negative impact on employment. If anything, the relationship between minimum wages and employment is estimated to be positive.

Improved Semantic Representations From Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Because of their superior ability to preserve sequence information over time, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a type of recurrent neural network with a more complex computational unit, have obtained strong results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. The only underlying LSTM structure that has been explored so far is a linear chain. However, natural language exhibits syntactic properties that would naturally combine words to phrases. We introduce the Tree-LSTM, a generalization of LSTMs to tree-structured network topologies. Tree-LSTMs outperform all existing systems and strong LSTM baselines on two tasks: predicting the semantic relatedness of two sentences (SemEval 2014, Task 1) and sentiment classification (Stanford Sentiment Treebank).Comment: Accepted for publication at ACL 201

Has The National Minimum Wage Reduced UK Wage Inequality?

This paper investigates the impact on the wage distribution of the introduction, in April 1999, of the National Minimum Wage in the UK. Because of the structure of UK earnings statistics, it is not straightforward to investigate this and a number of different methods for adjusting the published statistics are discussed. The main conclusions are that the NMW does have a detectable effect on the wage distribution and that compliance with the NMW is widespread but the impact is limited because the NMW has been set at a level such that only 6-7% of workers are directly affected and the NMW has had virtually no impact on the pay of workers not directly affected. Furthermore, virtually all the changes occurred within two months of the introduction in April 1999 and its impact declined over time from April 1999 to May 2001 as the minimum wage was not up-rated in line with the increase in average earnings.minimum wage, wage inequality

The Impact of the National Minimum Wage on the Wage Distribution in a Low-Wage Sector

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) that was introduced in April 1999 is sometimes paraded as evidence of the Blair government s commitment to reversing the rise in inequality that was characteristic of the last 25 years.

The Nuclear Fuel Cycle and South Australian Parliamentary Debates - 1976 to 1982

This manuscript is made available with permission from the State Electoral Office.On the 27 September 1977 Opposition leader, Dr David Tonkin, moved: That this House believes it is safe to mine and treat uranium in South Australia, rescinds its decision taken on 30 March 1977, and urges the Government to proceed with plans for the development and treatment of the State’s uranium sources as soon as possible (SAPD 1978, p.1,204). Enriching uranium was included in his vision for the treatment of the State’s uranium resources and, in this regard, he shared bipartisan ground with Rex Conner who, some years earlier as Minister for Minerals and Energy in the Whitlam Government, argued for constructing an enrichment plant in South Australia. Initially, Premier Don Dunstan supported uranium mining and enrichment but his change of tack presented Tonkin with an opportunity to unsettle an otherwise dominant Premier. The Advertiser and The News were solidly behind mining, while on the other side of the divide a public campaign joined with Labor’s left-wing to demand a moratorium on mining and enrichment activities. Debates over the virtues or otherwise of mining and enriching uranium are at the forefront of public debate today and thus enticing us to revisit the passionate debates that took place in both Houses between 1977 together with Norm Foster’s decision in 1982 to cross the floor to pass the Roxby Downs Indenture Bill. Foster’s move left a legacy of good fortune in train for Labor on the nuclear front. Had he remained ‘loyal’ to the party platform Tonkin would have campaigned at the 1982 State election with his trump card intact, namely attacking Labor’s uranium moratorium. Given the shift in community support in favour of Roxby going ahead, it is highly likely that Labor Opposition Leader, John Bannon, would have struggled to win the poll. The ignominy for Tonkin lies with his losing office after one only term. For Labor, the luck Foster’s move generated remains, oddly, a lasting legacy. The Rann Government enjoys the buoyancy offered by the creation of the largest uranium mine in the world and the jobs Tonkin so often argued to be the mine’s great virtue

Australian Cartoonists' Caricatures of Women Politicians - From Kirner to Stott-Despoja

In June 1999, the Labor Party’s deputy leader, Jenny Macklin, argued that cartoons such as the following two of Meg Lees were offensive and demeaning to women politicians because they reflect the cartoonists’ limited and unimaginative view of senior women in politics. For Macklin, women politicians are stereotyped as housewives, or objects for male sexual gratification, rather than depicted as ‘the politician that is the woman’.1 These claims are worth examining and are done so here in relation to cartoonists’ caricatures of some senior women politicians, in particular former Democrat leaders Meg Lees, Cheryl Kernot and Natasha Stott- Despoja; former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner and the phenomenon that was Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.Pert

Learning New Facts From Knowledge Bases With Neural Tensor Networks and Semantic Word Vectors

Knowledge bases provide applications with the benefit of easily accessible, systematic relational knowledge but often suffer in practice from their incompleteness and lack of knowledge of new entities and relations. Much work has focused on building or extending them by finding patterns in large unannotated text corpora. In contrast, here we mainly aim to complete a knowledge base by predicting additional true relationships between entities, based on generalizations that can be discerned in the given knowledgebase. We introduce a neural tensor network (NTN) model which predicts new relationship entries that can be added to the database. This model can be improved by initializing entity representations with word vectors learned in an unsupervised fashion from text, and when doing this, existing relations can even be queried for entities that were not present in the database. Our model generalizes and outperforms existing models for this problem, and can classify unseen relationships in WordNet with an accuracy of 75.8%

Estimating the Effect of Minimum Wages on Employment from the Distribution of Wages: A Critical View

In two papers, Meyer and Wise (1983a,b) present an ingenious method for estimating the effect of minimum wage rates on wages and employment using data based only on the observed cross-sectional distribution of wages. They, and others who have used this method, have generally found that the minimum wage causes substantial losses in employment. In this paper we evaluate the robustness of this technique. We argue that the estimates, at least for the UK, are very sensitive to the functional form assumed for the distribution of wages and to the assumption made about how far up the wage distribution the minimum wage has spillover effects.

Aid as a second-best solution: Seven problems of effectiveness and how to tackle them

Most rich countries developed without aid, and this 'self-development' has some intrinsic advantages. In today's massively unequal world, however, such an approach would imply very low levels of human development for several generations for many poor countries. Aid can therefore usefully be thought of as a necessary but 'second-best option'. The challenge then is how to manage this second-best option, particularly in the more aid-dependent states and the more fragile environments, in order to achieve sustainable results. The study examines seven problems that can limit the effectiveness of aid, and suggests possible ways of tackling them