This study investigates the antipoverty efficacy of minimum wage policies. Proponents of these policies contend that employment impacts are negligible and suggest that consumers pay for higher labor costs through imperceptible increases in goods prices. Adopting this empirical scenario, the analysis demonstrates that an increase in the national minimum wage produces a value-added tax effect on consumer prices that is more regressive than a typical state sales tax and allocates benefits as higher earnings nearly evenly across the income distribution. These income-transfer outcomes sharply contradict portraying an increase in the minimum wage as an antipoverty initiative.

This paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply. Using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior, a two-step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life-cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path.

On propose des estimateurs efficaces en considerant des hypotheses alternatives sur les sources d'endogeneite et les proprietes de variance-covariance des perturbations

James J. Heckman, Thomas E. Macurdy; A Life Cycle Model of Female Labour Supply, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 47, Issue 1, 1 January 1980, Pages 47–74

A variety of identification strategies have a common cell structure, in which the observed heterogeneity of the regression defines a partition of the sample into cells. Typically in the presence of exogenous covariates that define the cell structure, identification assumptions are imposed conditional on each value of the covariate, or cell by cell. Treatment effects across cells are typically heterogeneous. Researchers might be interested in unconditional parameters which are the averaged treatment effects across the cells. Alternatively, treatment effects can be estimated more efficiently if researchers are willing to impose additional parametric and semiparametric structures on the heterogeneous treatment effects across cells.