Optimal Minimum Wage Policy in Competitive Labor Markets
David Lee and
Emmanuel Saez
Additional contact information
David Lee: Princeton University and NBER
No 1105, Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.
Abstract:
This paper provides a theoretical analysis of optimal minimum wage policy in a perfectly competitive labor market. We show that a binding minimum wage while leading to unemployment is nevertheless desirable if the government values redistribution toward low wage workers and if unemployment induced by the minimum wage hits the lowest surplus workers first. This result remains true in the presence of optimal nonlinear taxes and transfers. In that context, a minimum wage effectively rations the low skilled labor that is subsidized by the optimal tax/transfer system, and improves upon the second-best tax/transfer optimum. When labor supply responses are along the extensive margin, a minimum wage and low skill work subsidies are complementary policies; therefore, the co-existence of a minimum wage with a positive tax rate for low skill work is always (second-best) Pareto inefficient. We derive formulas for the optimal minimum wage (with and without optimal taxes) as a function of labor supply and demand elasticities and the redistributive tastes of the government. We also present some illustrative numerical simulations.
Keywords: minimum wages; tax policy; labor supply; demand elasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C24 I29 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)
Downloads: (external link)
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp019019s246g/1/535.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error
Related works:
Journal Article: Optimal minimum wage policy in competitive labor markets (2012)
Working Paper: Optimal Minimum Wage Policy in Competitive Labor Markets (2010)
Working Paper: Optimal Minimum Wage Policy in Competitive Labor Markets (2010)
Working Paper: Optimal Minimum Wage Policy in Competitive Labor Markets (2008)
Working Paper: Optimal Minimum Wage Policy in Competitive Labor Markets (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:indrel:535
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().