This paper examines the congressional passage of the American minimum wage law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Voting on the act is modeled as a function of the concentration of the constituencies for minimum wage legislation, North-South differentials, and legislator ideology. It is shown that the House radically altered the final content of the bill, abandoning a proposed Wages and Hours Board with discretionary powers to determine minimum wages in favor of a flat rate following the objections of several interest groups; North-South divisions over the bill had little influence over congressional voting; and the influence of constituent groups increased relative to legislators' ideology as the bill became an important election issue.

This paper provides the first experimental test of Edward Lazear's (1979) model of deferred compensation. We examine the relation ship between firms' wage offers and workers' effort supply in a multi-period environment. If firms can ex ante commit to a wage schedule with deferred compensation, workers should respond by supplying sufficient effort to avoid dismissal. We contrast this full-commitment case to controls with no commitment and computer-generated wages in order to examine the roles of monetary incentives, social preferences, and reciprocity. Finally, we examine a setup without formal commitment, but where firms can build a reputation for paying deferred wages.