Complaining about noncompliance with the minimum wage law

Government enforcement of the minimum wage law is mainly initiated by workers' complaints of minimum wage violations. However, no attempt has been made in the growing literature on noncompliance to explore the role of labor market and enforcement parameters in generating an incentive for complaining, nor to explicitly incorporate the risk of complaining into the noncompliance decision. Addressing the issue of complaining, the present paper identifies the determinants of the decision to complain and examines the implications of a complaint-based enforcement system on the incentive for noncompliance and on labor market equilibrium.