NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Minimum Wages and Training Revisited

download in pdf format
   (1269 K)

email paper

David Neumark, William Wascher

NBER Working Paper No. 6651
Issued in July 1998
NBER Program(s):   LS

An NBER digest for this paper is available.

Theory predicts that minimum wages will reduce employer-provided on-the-job training designed to improve workers' skills on the current job, but may increase the amount of training that workers obtain to qualify for a job. We estimate the effects of minimum wages on the amount of both types of training received by young workers by exploiting cross-state variation in minimum wage increases. The evidence provides considerable support for the hypothesis that higher minimum wages reduce training (especially formal training) aimed at improving skills on the current job. At the same time, there is little or no evidence that minimum wages increase training undertaken to qualify for or obtain jobs. Consequently, it appears that, overall, minimum wages substantially reduce training received by young workers.

Published: Neumark, David and William Wascher. "Minimum Wages And Training Revisited," Journal of Labor Economics, 2001, v19(3,Jul), 563-595.

This paper is available as PDF (1269 K) or via email.

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

Support
National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org

Contact Us