Читать книгу Inequality and the Labor Market - Группа авторов - Страница 19

The side of the market with power dominates in setting wages and labor conditions. And in today’s economy employers have the power. In recent years a raft of empirical analysis has discredited the idea that U.S. labor markets are competitive, and that the law of one price prevails in the labor market.

The debate over minimum wage increases provides one example of the changing conventional wisdom. Policymakers long considered raising minimum wages to be a trade-off because, in a competitive labor market, if you raise wages for workers, you reduce the total number of jobs. But in the 1990s David Card and Alan Krueger (1994) analyzed the effects of minimum wage hikes in New Jersey, and found no effect on employment. Additional work has confirmed their findings that minimum wage hikes have little to no effect on employment, indicating that wages are not, in fact, set in the manner described by the textbook competition model.⁷

Earlier in this introduction I described a number of other pieces of evidence that support the hypothesis of limited competition in labor markets, such as the correlation between market concentration and wages. We also saw the prevalence of practices (e.g., anticompetitive contracts) that simply would not exist if markets were truly competitive. There are many other pieces of evidence illuminated by the chapters in this book.

One rather different kind of study focuses on the effect of trade shocks, such as the opening up of trade with China. In fully competitive, well-functioning labor markets, although increased imports of a particular good would directly affect firms that compete with Chinese products, they would not affect wages: any impact on local labor markets would be limited and temporary. Yet the major study by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013) shows significant adverse effects, with wages falling and unemployment increasing.

While evidence on labor market competition continues to mount, there is much more to learn. The final two chapters in this book are devoted to putting in place effective frameworks for policymakers to better understand the impact of labor-market policies in markets with limited competition. This entails improved access to information—including the linking of administrative data and survey data. But it also means building out an evaluation infrastructure at various levels of government, to include funding and empowering chief evaluation officers at federal agencies, building evaluations into the design of programs, and providing adequate funding for evaluations.