앨런 크루거, 최저임금 인상은 고용 증감에 거의 영향을 끼치지 않는다

미국 적정 최저임금에 대한 한 주장 - 앨런 크루거. 

(ALAN B. KRUEGER    -  OCT. 9, 2015  기고문)

2009년 이후 2015년까지 미연방 최저임금이 7.25달러로 묶여있다.

1990년 경, 최저임금 연구를 할 때만 해도, 나 역시 다른 대부분 경제연구가들처럼 ‘최저 임금  wage floor’은 특정 그룹 고용을 감소시킬 것이라고 생각했다.

그러나 동료들과 연구를 해보니, 최저임금이 너무 적지도 너무 많지도 않은 ‘적정선’을 유지한다면, 최저임금이 반드시 일자리 감소를 발생하지 않는다는 것을 알게 되었다.-

최저임금이 인상되면 어떤 고용주는 노동자들을 해고시키는 반면에, 다른 고용주들은 다른 측면들을 발견하게 된다. 

즉  최저임금이 올라가면, 고용주들이 구직자들을 구하기 쉽고, 노동 회전율(이직/대체 등:turnover)을 감소시킬 수 있다. 이 결과 고용주들의 이윤량은 줄어들지만,  고용이 오히려 증가된다.

지난 25년간 연구 결과에 따르면, 적정 최저임금 인상은 고용에 거의 영향을 미치지 않거나 미치더라도 미세한 정도에 지나지 않는다.

사례제시:1) 1992년 뉴저지 최저임금이 4.25달러에서 5.05달러로 인상되었을 때, 뉴욕주 패스트 푸드 산업 고용성장이 바로 옆에 주인 펜실베니아 주 고용성장과 동일한 정도로  발생했다. 당시 펜실베니아 주의 최저임금은 4.25달러였다.

위 발견만큼 중요한 관찰내용이 하나 더 있다.

2) 저임금 식당 고용 성장도 고임금 식당 고용성장만큼 이뤄졌다. 전자는 최저임금 인상의 영향을 받는 곳이고, 후자는 직접적인 영향이 없는 곳임에도. 왜냐하면 임금이 많은 식당에서 일하는 노동자들은 이미 인상된 최저임금보다 더 많이 많고 있기 때문에 별 영향을 받지 않는다. 

저임금 노동자의 고용을 악화시키지 않고,  실업자를 늘리지 않는 최저임금은 얼마인가? 저임금 노동자의 소득을 감소시키면서, 임금 소득보다 실업을 더 많이 발생시킬 수 있는 최저임금 수준은 어느정도인가? 

최저임금이 어느정도가 ‘적정’ ‘적당’한가에 대한 질문을 많이 받는다.

난 다음 5년 안에연방 기준으로 12달러까지 올라야 한다고 본다. 영국 ‘독립 저임금 위원회’의 연구 결과에 따르면 최저 소득층에게는 평균 임금보다 더 높은 임금 인상으로 귀결되었지만 고용이나 경제 전반에 부정적인 영향은 없었다.향후 몇 년 안에 미국도 최저임금 12달러를 책정하게 되면 현재 영국에 거의 근접하게 될 것이다. 

(앨런 크루거가 오바마 행정부에서 경제자문위원회 의장으로 일한 바 있다:November 7, 2011 – August 2, 2013) 

1995년에 출판된 데이비드 카드, 앨런 크루거 책, "신화와 측정, 최저임금에 대한 새로운 경제학"

 Moreover, a reanalysis of previous minimumwage studies finds little support for the prediction that minimum wages reduce employment. If accepted, our findings call into question the standard model of the labor market that has dominated economists' thinking for the past half century. 

Our main empirical findings can be summarized as follows. First, a study of employment in the fast-food industry after the recent 1992 increase in the New Jersey minimum wage shows that employment was not affected adversely by the law. Our results are derived from a specially designed survey of more than 400 restaurants throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, conducted before and after the increase in the New Jersey minimum wage.

 Relative to restaurants in Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained unchanged, we find that employment in New Jersey actually expanded with the increase in the minimum wage. Furthermore, when we examine restaurants within New Jersey, we find that employment growth was higher at restaurants that were forced to increase their wages to comply with the law than at those stores that already were paying more than the new minimum. 

We find similar results in studies of fast-food restaurants in Texas after the 1991 increase in the federal minimum wage, and of teenage workers after the 1988 increase in California's minimum wage.

Second, a cross-state analysis finds that the 1990 and 1991 increases in the federal minimum wage did not affect teenage employment adversely. The federal minimum increased from $3.35 per hour to $3.80 on April 1, 1990, and to $4.25 per hour on April 1, 1991. 

We categorized states into groups on the basis of the fraction of teenage workers who were earning between $3.35 and $3.80 per hour just before ·the first minimum-wage increase took effect.

 In high-wage states, such as California and Massachusetts, relatively few teenagers were in the range in which the minimum-wage increase would affect pay rates, whereas in low-wage states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, as many as 50 percent of teenagers were in the affected wage range. 

On the basis of the textbook model of the minimum wage, one would expect teenage employment to decrease in the low-wage states, where the federal minimum wage raised pay rates, relative to high-wage states, where the minimum had far less effect. Contrary to this expectation, our results show no meaningful difference in employment growth between high-wage and low-wage states.

 If anything, the states with the largest fraction of workers affected by the minimum wage had the largest gains in teenage employment. This conclusion continues to hold when we adjust for differences in regional economic growth that occurred during the early 1990s, and conduct the analysis with state-level data, rather than regional data.

 A similar analysis of employment trends for a broader sample of low-wage workers, and for employees in the retail trade and restaurant industries, likewise fails to uncover a negative employment effect of the federal minimum wage.

Third, we update and reevaluate the time-series analysis of teenage employment that is the most widely cited evidence for the prediction that a higher minimum wage reduces employment. 

When the same econometric specifications that were used during the 1970s are re-estimated with data from more recent years, the historical relationship between minimum wages and teenage employment is weaker and no longer statistically significant. 

We also discuss and reanalyze several previous minimum-wage studies that used crosssectional or panel data. We find that the evidence showing the minimum wage has no effect or a positive effect on employment is at least as compelling as the evidence showing it has an adverse effect.

 Fourth, we document a series of anomalies associated with the low-wage labor market and the minimum wage. An increase in the minimum wage leads to a sitUation in which workers who previously were paid different wages all receive the new minimum wage. 

This finding is difficult to reconcile with the view that each worker originally was paid exactly· what he or she was worth. Increases in the minimum wage also generate a "ripple effect," leading to pay raises for workers who previously earned wages above the new minimum. 

More surprisingly, increases in the minimum wage do not appear to be offset by reductions in fringe benefits. Furthermore, employers have been reluctant to use the subminimum-wage provisions of recent legislation. Each of these findings casts further doubt on the validity of the textbook model of the minimum wage. 

Fifth, we find that recent increases in the minimum wage have reduced wage dispersion, partially reversing the trend toward rising wage inequality that has dominated the labor market since the early 1980s. 

Contrary to popular stereotypes, minimum~wage increases accrue disproportionately to individuals in low-income families. Indeed, two-thirds of minimum-wage earners are adults, and the earnings of a typical minimum-wage worker account for about one-half of his or her family's total earnings.

 In states in which the recent increases in the federal minimum wage had the greatest impact on wages, we find that earnings increased for families at the bottom of the earnings distribution. 

The minimum wage is a blunt instrument for reducing overall poverty, however, because many minimum-wage earners are not in poverty, and because many of those in poverty are not connected to the labor market. 

We calculate that the 90-cent increase in the minimum wage between 1989 and 1991 transferred roughly $5.5 billion to low-wage workers (or 0.2 percent of economy-wide earnings)-an amount that is smaller than most other federal antipoverty programs, and that can have only limited effects on the overall income distribution. 

Sixth, we examine the impact of news about minimum-wage legislation on the value of firms that employ minimum-wage workers. 

Stock market event studies suggest that most of the news about the impending minimum-wage increases during the late 1980s led to little or no change in the market value of low-wage employers, such as restaurants, hotels, and dry cleaners.

 In contrast, more recent news of possible increases in the minimum wage may have led to small declines in shareholder wealth-1 or 2 percent, at most. 

If a single study found anomalous evidence on the employment effect of the minimum wage, it could be easily dismissed. But the broad array of evidence presented in this book is more difficult to dismiss. 

Taken as a whole, our findings pose a serious challenge to the simple textbook theory that economists have used to describe the effect of the minimum wage. 

They also provide an opportunity to develop and test alternative theories about the operation of the labor market. As a step in this direction, we present and evaluate several models that depart only slightly from the textbook model, and yet are capable of explaining a broader range of reactions to the minimum wage.

* 참고자료:

WE CAN AFFORD A $12.00 FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE IN 2020

BY DAVID COOPER, LAWRENCE MISHEL, AND JOHN SCHMITT

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-minimum-wage-how-much-is-too-much.html

The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much?

By ALAN B. KRUEGEROCT. 9, 2015-

THE federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. 

While Congress has refused to take action, Democratic politicians have been engaged in something of a bidding war to propose raising the minimum wage ever higher: first to $10.10, then to $12, and now some are pushing for $15 an hour.

Research suggests that a minimum wage set as high as $12 an hour will do more good than harm for low-wage workers, but a $15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences.

When Congress delays raising the minimum wage, states and cities typically step in and raise their own minimum wages. That is exactly what is happening now.

More than half of the states, representing 60 percent of the United States population, now have minimum wages that exceed the federal level. 

The fact that voters in four “red” states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — voted overwhelmingly last year to raise their states’ minimum wages to as high as $9.75 an hour is a testament to the support the minimum wage enjoys among the population at large.

Some cities plan to raise their wage floors to $15 an hour. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared last month that “every working man and woman in the state of New York deserves $15 an hour as a minimum wage.”

When I started studying the minimum wage 25 years ago, like most economists at that time I expected that the wage floor reduced employment for some groups of workers. But research that I and others have conducted convinced me that if the minimum wage is set at a moderate level it does not necessarily reduce employment. 

While some employers cut jobs in response to a minimum-wage increase, others find that a higher wage floor enables them to fill their vacancies and reduce turnover, which raises employment, even though it eats into their profits. 

The net effect of all this, as has been found in most studies of the minimum wage over the last quarter-century, is that when it is set at a moderate level, the minimum wage has little or no effect on employment. 

For example, David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, and I found that when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour in 1992 (or from about $7.25 to $8.60 in today’s dollars), job growth at fast-food restaurants in the state was just as strong as it was at restaurants across the border in Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained $4.25 an hour. 

Equally important — but less well known — within New Jersey, job growth was just as strong at low-wage restaurants that were constrained by the law to raise pay as it was at higher-wage restaurants that were not directly affected by the increase since their workers already earned more than the new minimum.

I am frequently asked, “How high can the minimum wage go without jeopardizing employment of low-wage workers? And at what level would further minimum wage increases result in more job losses than wage gains, lowering the earnings of low-wage workers as a whole?”

Although available research cannot precisely answer these questions, I am confident that a federal minimum wage that rises to around $12 an hour over the next five years or so would not have a meaningful negative effect on United States employment. 

One reason for this judgment is that around 140 research projects commissioned by Britain’s independent Low Pay Commission have found that the minimum wage “has led to higher than average wage increases for the lowest paid, with little evidence of adverse effects on employment or the economy.” 

A $12-per-hour minimum wage in the United States phased in over several years would be in the same ballpark as Britain’s minimum wage today.

But $15 an hour is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in the United States.

More logical is the proposed legislation from Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, calling for raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020. 

Their bill is co-sponsored by 32 senators, and supported by President Obama and Hillary Clinton. High-wage cities and states could raise their minimums to $15.

Although the plight of low-wage workers is a national tragedy, the push for a nationwide $15 minimum wage strikes me as a risk not worth taking, especially because other tools, such as the earned-income tax credit, can be used in combination with a higher minimum wage to improve the livelihoods of low-wage workers.

Economics is all about understanding trade-offs and risks. The trade-off is likely to become more severe, and the risk greater, if the minimum wage is set beyond the range studied in past research.

Alan B. Krueger is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.