TY - JOUR AU - Neumark,David AU - Wascher,William TI - Minimum Wages and Training Revisited JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 6651 PY - 1998 Y2 - July 1998 DO - 10.3386/w6651 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6651 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6651.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Neumark Department of Economics University of California, Irvine 3151 Social Science Plaza Irvine, CA 92697 Tel: 949-824-8496 Fax: 949/824-2182 E-Mail: dneumark@uci.edu William Wascher Federal Reserve Board Stop 66 Washington, DC 20551 Tel: 202/452-2812 Fax: 202/452-5296 E-Mail: william.l.wascher@frb.gov M2 - featured in NBER digest on 1998-12-01 AB - 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. ER -