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A Note on Measuring the Depth of Minimum Wage Violation
Author(s) -
Bhorat Haroon,
Kanbur Ravi,
Mayet Natasha
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
labour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.403
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1467-9914
pISSN - 1121-7081
DOI - 10.1111/labr.12010
Subject(s) - measure (data warehouse) , analogy , wage , economics , enforcement , econometrics , empirical measure , minimum wage , mathematics , computer science , statistics , law , labour economics , political science , philosophy , data mining , linguistics
In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices that, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The standard measure is a special case of this family of indices, but other members of the family highlight the depth of violation. We present an application to S outh A frica to show that the depth of violation matters, and is not captured by the standard measure in actual situations.