This paper investigates the impact of the effective minimum wage, defined as the log difference between the minimum and the median wages, on wage inequalities in the OECD countries. Unlike the previous studies that focus on single countries in which the minimum wage has no cross-sectional variation and rely instead on within-country variations of wage distribution across regions or socio-economic characteristics, we use a country panel that allows for both cross-sectional and time-series variations in minimum wage. We also control for more factors than in the previous studies whose absence may cause endogeneity. Our results confirm the previous findings that increases in minimum wage alleviate the wage inequality at the lower tail of the wage distribution, while having little effect at the upper tail. The estimated effect is larger for women than for men, which is consistent with the fact that the share of workers who are directly affected by the changes in minimum wage is bigger among women than men. An application of the IVs of Autor, Manning and Smith (2016) supports the robustness of our findings.

中文翻译：

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经合组织国家的最低工资和工资不平等

本文研究了有效最低工资（定义为最低工资和中位数工资之间的对数差）对经合组织国家工资不平等的影响。与之前的研究关注最低工资没有横截面变化的单一国家不同，而是依赖于国家内部跨地区工资分布或社会经济特征的变化，我们使用一个国家面板，允许最低工资的部门和时间序列变化。我们还控制了比以前的研究更多的因素，这些因素的缺失可能导致内生性。我们的结果证实了先前的发现，即最低工资的增加缓解了工资分布下尾的工资不平等，而对上尾的影响不大。女性的估计影响大于男性，这与直接受最低工资变化影响的工人比例在女性中大于男性的事实是一致的。Autor、Manning 和 Smith (2016) 的 IV 的应用支持了我们研究结果的稳健性。