When the minimum wage really bites hard: The negative spillover effect on high-skilled workers
中文摘要
全球各地最低工资水平正在上升。为了进一步揭示提高工资下限可能产生的意外副作用，我们在准实验环境中研究了最低工资引入对工资和就业的影响，在该环境中，经济下行期间最低工资被设定得异常高。我们识别了不同工资和技能群体的处理效应，发现对工资刚好高于最低工资的中等技能工人存在正向的工资和就业溢出效应。更为引人注目的是，我们发现对处于工资分布更上方的高技能工人存在负向的工资和就业效应，随后是技能回报和行业技能供给的下降。我们用替代-规模模型解释了这些调整，该模型预测，每当向高技能工人的劳动-劳动替代被行业就业的整体下降过度抵消时，就会出现负向溢出效应。尽管我们聚焦于一个特定行业，但我们阐明了此类不利调整可能在其他情境中发生的一般条件。
Abstract
Minimum wage levels are rising around the globe. To shed more light on the possible unintended side effects of higher wage floors, we study the impact of a minimum wage introduction on wages and employment in a quasi-experimental setting where the minimum wage is set extraordinarily high during an economic downturn. We identify treatment effects along different wage and skill groups and find positive wage and employment spillover effects for medium-skilled workers with salaries just above the minimum wage. More striking, we find negative wage and employment effects for high-skilled workers who are further up the wage distribution, followed by reduced returns to skills and industry skill supply. We explain these adjustments with a substitution-scale model that predicts negative spillover effects whenever labor-labor substitutions toward high-skilled workers are overcompensated by an overall decline in industry employment. Even though we focus on a specialized industry, we lay out the general conditions under which such unfavorable adjustments may occur in other contexts.