minimum wage的英譯漢
Debates about the minimum wage tend to center on the relative magnitudes of its redistributive benefits and unemployment costs.The debate about the employment effects of the minimum wage has been especially heated.Brown (1999) and Neumark and Wascher (2007) give comprehensive overviews of the debate on the possible employment cost
of the minimum wage.
However,the costs of the minimum wage are not necessarily limited to unemployment.The minimum wage also interferes with the allocative function of the labor market,which could lead to an inefficient allocation of workers to jobs .Even if the increase in the minimum wage has no impact on total employment,it can cause inefficient rationing.This happens if workers who were unwilling to work at the old and lower minimum wage end up in jobs that otherwise would have been filled by
workers of the same skill level who are willing to work at the old minimum wage.In this case,workers with reservation wages below the old minimum wage are displaced by workers with reservation wages above the old minimum wage.The deadweight loss of such inefficient rationing is equal to the difference between the reservation wages of these two types of workers and,as Glaeser and Luttmer (2003) point out,this deadweight loss is typically a first-order loss.In practice,of course,the
minimum wage can also affect the level of employment.As explained in more detail in Section below,the extent to which the minimum wage induces inefficient rationing can be inferred from changes in reservation wages after controlling for the change in reservation wages that can be accounted for by the change in employment.Because the minimum wage is only binding for a relatively small group of unskilled individuals,it is necessary to identify these individuals accurately in order to obtain precise estimates of minimum wage effects.
Over time,however,the wage that a person with a constant skill level earns may change for many reasons,such as changes in technology or in the minimum wage.Thus,to use the wage as a measure of skill,it is important to net out these state-specific changes in the returns to skill.While the lack of evidence of inefficient rationing bears favorably on using the minimum wage as an instrument for income redistribution,the estimates of the employment effects of the minimum wage suggest caution.
I find that employment among the unskilled drops significantly in states where the minimum wage had the greatest impact.This loss in employment seems to be largely offset by a gain in employment among the low-skilled.Hence,while total employment may not be significantly affected,some of the least skilled members of society are likely to be hurt
by the minimum wage.