Auto-SummaryThe minimum wage causes unemployment, contrary to the conventional wisdom of economists. While defenders of the minimum wage argue that higher incomes for working poor offset job losses, recent studies by Card, Krueger, and Katz suggest minimal impact on employment. However, these findings contradict numerous empirical studies, which show that minimum wage increases lead to job losses, particularly affecting teenage employment. Higher minimum wages also discourage employers from investing in training, further harming low-wage workers' long-term prospects.
"For many years it has been a matter of conventional wisdom among economists that the minimum wage causes fewer jobs to exist than would be the case without it. This is simply a matter of price theory, taught in every economics textbook, requiring no elaborate analysis to justify. Were this not the case, there would be no logical reason why the minimum wage could not be set at $10, $100, or $1 million per hour.
Historically, defenders of the minimum wage have not disputed the disemployment effects of the minimum wage, but argued that on balance the working poor were better off. In other words, the higher incomes of those with jobs offset the lower incomes of those without jobs, as a result of the minimum wage [See, for example, Levitan and Belous, (1979)].
Now, the Clinton Administration is advancing the novel economic theory that modest increases in the minimum wage will have no impact whatsoever on employment. This proposition is based entirely on the work of three economists: David Card and Alan Krueger of Princeton, and Lawrence Katz of Harvard. Their studies of increases in the minimum wage in California, Texas and New Jersey apparently found no loss of jobs among fast food restaurants that were surveyed before and after the increase [See Card (1992b), Card and Krueger (1994), and Katz and Krueger (1992)].
While it is not yet clear why Card, Katz and Krueger got the results that they did, it is clear that their findings are directly contrary to virtually every empirical study ever done on the minimum wage. These studies were exhaustively surveyed by the Minimum Wage Study Commission, which concluded that a 10% increase in the minimum wage reduced teenage employment by 1% to 3%.
The following survey of the academic research on the minimum wage is designed to give nonspecialists a sense of just how isolated the Card, Krueger and Katz studies are. It will also indicate that the minimum wage has wide-ranging negative effects that go beyond unemployment. For example, higher minimum wages encourage employers to cut back on training, thus depriving low wage workers of an important means of long-term advancement, in return for a small increase in current income. For many workers this is a very bad trade-off, but one for which the law provides no alternative. "
http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/50years.htm
"Economic theory demonstrates that minimum-wage legislation will inevitably create unemployment. It cannot, by its very nature, indicate how much unemployment will be generated in any particular instance. However, numerous statistical studies are in rare agreement in their support of a causal relationship between minimum wages and unemployment.
For example, the 1983 Report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources of the General Accounting Office found virtually total agreement that employment is lower than it would have been if no minimum wage existed. This is the case even in periods of substantial economic growth. . . . The severity of the employment loss varies among different age, gender, and racial groups in the population. Teenage workers, for instance, have greater job losses, relative to their share of the population or the employed work force, than adults.[7]
According to the 1981 Report of the Minimum Waqe Study Commission, the 46 percent rise in the minimum wage between 1977 and 1981 destroyed 644,000 jobs among teenagers alone. "The evidence is now in, and the findings of dozens of major economic studies show that the damage done by the minimum wage has been far more severe than even the critics . . . predicted." [8]
A 1983 survey, "Time-Series Evidence of the Effect of the Minimum Wage on Youth Employment," found that studies conducted between 1973 and 1983 generally agreed that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would result in a 1 to 3 percent reduction in teenage employment.[9] Given these findings, the proposal to raise the minimum wage by nearly 40 percent could result in a 4 to 12 percent drop in the employment of teens.
A recent study by Clemson University economists Richard B. McKenzie and Curtis Simon estimated that an increase in the minimum wage to $4.65 by 1990 would cost 764,000 jobs by that year and 1.9 million jobs by 1995. The economic output lost in 1995 would total $70 billion (in 1982 dollars).[10] The political embarrassment created by such estimates was graphically illustrated recently when the House Democratic leadership suppressed a Congressional Budget Office study that predicted a loss of 250,000 to 500,000 jobs if the minimum wage was increased to $5.05. The majority staff of the House Education and Labor Committee sent the study back and asked for a new version that lacked any reference to the bill's prospective impact on unemployment and inflation. The majority staff director explained that the CBO had "provided information that was not requested."[11]
The Senate Republican Policy Committee, citing a General Accounting Office study, estimated that increasing the minimum wage from $3.35 to $4.61, as suggested by AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland, would eliminate between 124,000 and 619,000 jobs.[12]
It is not surprising that AFL-CIO economist John L. Zalusky disputes these findings. He predicts that a $1 increase in the minimum wage would eliminate very few jobs, and his "hunch is that a wage hike would provide a mild stimulus" to economic growth.[13] According to Zalusky's model, created for the union by the econometrics firm Data Resources Inc. (DRI), a $1 increase would eliminate 450,000 jobs during the next eight years. However, Zalusky says, this loss has little importance when compared with the 11 million jobs that the model predicts would be created in the same period.[14] Zalusky claims that such "real world evidence" casts doubt on the "theoretical constructs" of economics.
Zalusky's casual dismissal of theoretical constructs implies that his model is somehow theory-free and concerned with only the objective numbers. This is simply not the case. Any statistical or econometric model requires that some theory be used to determine what data are needed to test it.[15] In fact, two theoretical assumptions of Zalusky's model make its results quite deceptive..."
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html
and some other random little snippets from various places:
"[federal reserve economist Peter Tulip] concludes:
-A 10 percent rise in the minimum wage raises the NAIRU [unemployment index] by about half a percentage point.
2. Increases in the minimum wage in the 1960s and 1970s caused the NAIRU to almost double (see figure).
3. By the late 1960s, the minimum wage was responsible for more than half of the NAIRU.
4. But when the nominal (money) value of the minimum wage during the 1980s was frozen, NAIRU fell from more than 7 percent in 1980 to less than 5 percent by the end of the decade."
http://www.ncpa.org/hotlines/min/pd082100a.html
"Why is it that Washington state's entry-level job applicants faced one of the highest rates of unemployment in the nation this year? The state's unemployment rate is 15 percent higher than the national average and 42 percent higher than it was five years ago when the state introduced a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum.
Washington state is not alone in experiencing this perpetual high state unemployment. Oregon, Washington and Alaska are among the five states with the highest unemployment rates. It is perhaps no coincidence that these three states have the highest state minimum wages in the nation. Decades of research confirm Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker's observation: "A higher minimum will further reduce the employment opportunities of workers with few skills.""
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html?searchpagefrom=1&searchdiff=49
"An increase in the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour, as President Clinton proposes, would drive teenagers with few skills out of the workplace and out of the schools, say members of the African-American leadership group Project 21.
According to a new study by David Neumark for the Employment Policies Institute, an increase in the minimum wage would have the perverse effect of increasing both the school dropout rate and teenage unemployment."
[url=http://www.nationalcenter.org/MinWage.html] ]http://www.nationalcenter.org/MinWage.html[/url]
"Yet, despite an overall unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, a 29-year low, there are groups of workers whose unemployment rates are startlingly high?the teenage black male unemployment rate last month was nearly 33 percent. Research on the disemployment effects of the minimum wage have focused especially on those workers with the lowest skills and least labor force attachment, because they are the most likely to be affected by a high wage floor. A 1998 study by Burkhauser, Couch, and Wittenberg reaffirms earlier findings that raising the minimum wage reduces teenage employment, with a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage leading to employment losses of 1 to 3 percent. The figure shows the range of estimated employment losses associated with recent and proposed increases in the minimum wage. Because slightly over 7 million teens were employed in May of 1998, raising the minimum wage to $6.15 could lead to a decline of between 2 and 6 percent in job availability for this group."
http://www.epf.org/research/newsletters/1999/eb990510.asp
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