Raising the Minimum Wage

I was going to keep this for Monday, but this is too timely (excerpt):

Be Careful When Raising Minimum Wages
By Noah Smith

Minimum wages are one of the most contentious topics in economic policy. Many states and cities are experimenting with big minimum wage increases, so that there is now a lot of variation across the country...

...To many in the news media and in the world of think tanks and activists, being pro- or anti-minimum wage is akin to a religious belief. But even in the world of economics research, there’s plenty of disagreement.

A slew of recent minimum-wage studies illustrate the point...

It’s important to remember that these studies are all very limited. Some of them, like the Leamer et al. and the Allegretto et al. studies, are preliminary and subject to change once the final analysis is concluded. The studies that use synthetic controls -- Jardim et al. and Allegretto et al. -- could be wrong if they’ve chosen the wrong controls, which is easy to do. The method used by Cengiz et al. requires its own set of assumptions, which could be wrong.

At this point, anyone following the research debate will be tempted to throw up their hands. What can we learn from a bunch of contradictory studies, each with its own potential weaknesses and flaws? Some extreme cynics even see the contradictory minimum wage results as reason to doubt the usefulness of empirical economics itself.

But this is the wrong response. The right reaction to the contradictory studies is caution. Policy makers and advisers should read the whole literature, including studies that yield conclusions they don’t like. They should try to get a picture of which research methods are considered the most reliable, and why. And then they should move forward cautiously with policy, taking steps to try to help the poor, but not making the steps so big and bold that they can’t be reversed if things go wrong.

In the case of minimum wages, a majority of the evidence seems to indicate that raising the wage floor by modest amounts isn't very dangerous. That means that experiments like the ones now underway in places like Seattle should continue. But the studies showing larger harm from minimum wages boosts should be a reason not to make the increases too large or abrupt, and not to implement big hikes at the federal level. To borrow a phrase from Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the right approach is to “cross the river by feeling the stones.”

I'm generally supportive of the notion that the minimum wage is a necessary tool for addressing labour market imperfections and wage inequality. But there's also such a thing as pushing something too far, too fast.

One key problem with the Malaysian labour market is that, unlike in developed countries, a significant portion of the labour force is in the informal sector, where the minimum wage won’t apply and can’t be enforced. In other words, it’s not a silver bullet for the problem of low incomes. A second issue is that, in my own delvings into the impact of the minimum wage in Malaysia, the disemployment impact was statistically significant i.e. it cost jobs, even if the overall welfare benefits outweighed those job losses. So there is a very real trade-off involved. Third, the most recent minimum wage revision showed no impact at all on wages in proximity to the minimum wage level, i.e. zero welfare gains.

So the fact that Malaysia has a minimum wage at all is a positive, but let’s not get too carried away that it’s any kind of total solution. It isn’t.