Executive Summary:
The new conventional wisdom holds that a large increase in the minimum wage would be desirable policy. Advocates for this policy dismiss the traditional concern that such an increase would lower employment for many of the low-skilled workers that the increase is intended to help. Recent economic research, they claim, demonstrates that the disemployment effects of increasing minimum wages are small or nonexistent, while there are large social benefits to raising the wage floor.
This policy analysis discusses four ways in which the case for large minimum wage increases is either mistaken or overstated.
First, the new conventional wisdom misreads the totality of recent evidence for the negative effects of minimum wages. Several strands of research arrive regularly at the conclusion that high minimum wages reduce opportunities for disadvantaged individuals.
Second, the theoretical basis for minimum wage advocates’ claims is far more limited than they seem to realize. Advocates offer rationales for why current wage rates might be suppressed relative to their competitive market values. These arguments are reasonable to a point, but they are a weak basis for making claims about the effects of large minimum wage increases.
Third, economists’ empirical methods have blind spots. Notably, firms’ responses to minimum wage changes can occur in nuanced ways. I discuss why economists’ methods will predictably fail to capture firms’ responses in their totality.
Finally, the details of employees’ schedules, perks, fringe benefits, and the organization of the workplace are central to firms’ management of both their costs and productivity. Yet data on many aspects of workers’ relationships with their employers are incomplete, if not entirely lacking. Consequently, empirical evidence will tend to understate the minimum wage’s negative effects and overstate its benefits.
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