Wages and Hours Laws: What Do We Know? What Can Be Done?

• Main Authors: Charles C. Brown, Daniel S. Hamermesh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Russell Sage Foundation 2019-11-01
• Series: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
• Subjects: minimum wages; overtime; employment; hours; labor regulation
• Online Access: https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/5/68

We summarize recent research on the wage and employment effects of minimum wage laws in the United States and infer from non-U.S. studies of hours laws the likely effects of unchanging U.S. hours laws. The effective minimum wage, increasingly a province of state government, is now closely related to the lower end of a state’s wage distribution. Original estimates demonstrate how the forty-five-year failure to increase the exempt earnings level for salaried workers 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 United States have produced impacts in the directions predicted by economic theory, but that these effects have been quite small.