Minimum Wages, Monopsony and Towns

Alan Manning has a very good article in Foreign Affairs about minimum wages. The impact of minimum wages on employment is a politically charged issue in economics, and so is similar in that sense to most of macro. With minimum wages, the battlefield is empirical. I often think of this battle when people accuse mainstream economics as being hopelessly neoliberal: it was mainstream economists (David Card and Alan Krueger) who first showed that the data did not conform to what Manning describes as Econ 101 economics, and other mainstream economists who have continued to find this result.

I think two conclusions can be drawn from the many studies that followed Card and Krueger. First, empirical work clearly shows plenty of examples where imposing or increasing minimum wages did not reduce employment. However few would argue that result will hold in all situations for all levels of the minimum wage. That is why, before George Osborne raised it, the UK minimum wage level was set by the Low Pay Commission, who tried to assess these issues. Perhaps the Commission became too cautious, but no doubt we will see more studies on the Osborne increase in due course.In my view another key issue future studies should address is whether increasing nominal wages has any impact on productivity.

Manning also makes a point about the limitations of minimum wages as a tool to deal with poverty. He points out that as “an hourly rate, the minimum wage on its own reveals little about the household income of those who earn it.” He suggests that minimum wages work well alongside earned income tax credits. Minimum wages can help prevent employers capturing part of tax credits by cutting wages in the knowledge that the state would make up the difference.

There are two main reasons why Econ 101 (first year undergraduate) economics gives the wrong answer on minimum wages: search and monopsony. Take search first. In the Econ 101 world no one celebrates getting a new job or worries about losing an existing one. One reason most people do both is search: it takes time and effort to find a new job. Equally it costs the firm money to recruit new people. That creates a zone around the Econ 101 wage within which variations in wages would not lead to job losses or people leaving. Where the actual wage is within that zone will depend on bargaining power between the worker and firm.

Monopsony is the situation where alternative employment opportunities for workers are scarce, which gives the firm the power to set wages below the perfectly competitive level of the standard Econ 101 model. (There is an element of search here too: the costs of moving location. These are much larger than the costs of looking for a job in your own area, particularly for families.) The classic example of monopsony is the town where there is just one major employer.

I suspect many labour economists regard monopsony in the labour market as something of a special case. That perception may need updating, argues Marshall Steinbaum here, drawing on recent work by him and coauthors for the US. They find “that most labor markets (as defined by occupation and geography) are very concentrated [few firms], and that this concentration has a robust negative impact on posted wages for job openings.” That is exactly what you would expect from monopsony: the fewer firms there are in a location, the less often vacancies occur, so the less these firms when suppressing wages have to worry that workers will quit.

The article considers a number of policy implications stemming from widespread monopsony that are worth reading. This could include, in the UK, improving rail communications into cities besides London. The one directly relevant to this post is that these results may help explain why minimum wages do not reduce employment. In the absence of minimum wages, relatively poorly performing firms may be able to shift the impact of poor performance from profits to wages. The minimum wage stops that happening. 

If monopsony is prevalent in large towns but not big cities, I couldn't help wondering if this might have something to do with the difference between towns and cities in the Brexit vote I mentioned in my last post. Support for Trump is also strong in the rural parts of the US, which is where Steinbaum et al find monopsony is prevalent. What this monopsony study suggests is that working conditions within firms are likely to be worse in towns than in cities. What impact might that have on voters? One response to worker exploitation in towns is for people to leave, as they do. For those who stay, an overriding concern might be the survival of firms within the town. This in turn could have an important impact on voter attitudes.  

A divided nation

After the Brexit vote, economists and others who voted Remain are quite right to say I told you so as the economic hit they expected comes to pass. The Brexit Bust needs to be labelled clearly, given the power the Leave side has over the means of communication. (Those behind that campaign are already talking utter nonsense in order to pretend it had nothing to do with them.) But those who voted Remain also need to understand why they lost.

The studies I’m going to focus on here use regressions and the breakdown of the Brexit vote district by district. [1] It is important to do regression analysis, which can look at more than one factor at a time, because influences are correlated with each other. We might note, for example, that districts are less likely to vote Leave if they contain relatively high earners, or relatively well educated people. So is it lack of education or lack of money that caused people to vote Leave? That is what any kind of multiple regression can try and sort out.

Before looking at individual studies, let me mention some things that appear to be uncontroversial. Education and age are key determinates: if you are less educated or older you tend to vote Leave. Both matter independently: although young people with few qualifications tend to vote Leave, they are less likely to do so than less qualified older people.Once you take these into account, income is not a significant factor. Geography matters in key ways. One of those is that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland were much less likely to want to leave (controlling for other factors). The other I will come to.

A key issue is whether the local level of migration has had an influence. Stephen Clarke and Matthew Whittaker at the Resolution Foundation find that the level of immigration is not important, but its recent rate of change is, in making people vote Leave. Zsolt Darvas at Bruegel also finds the level unimportant. However Monica Langella and Alan Manning from the LSE find that areas with high immigration are more likely to vote Leave, and confirm the finding that the rate of change matters too. So while two studies agree that areas with a recent large increase in immigration are more likely to vote leave, more work needs to be done on whether its actual level matters. However, even if it matters, it does not matter that much, as the large majority for Remain in London tells us.

One other area where the studies differ is employment or unemployment. Clarke and Whittaker suggest areas with a low employment rate are more likely to vote Leave, but Langella and Manning seem to find the opposite, and Darvas says any impact from levels of unemployment (which is not the same as the inverse of the employment rate) is explained by other factors which I will now come to.

There are some variables that have not been considered by all three of these studies. Darvas has one particularly interesting result: the Leave vote increases in areas where there is a lot of poverty and local inequality. Langella and Manning find that areas with long term declines in agricultural, manufacturing or public employment are more likely to vote Leave. This is also the conclusion of a team led by Bristol geographer Ron Johnston, which is worth quoting in full.

“There are substantial parts of the country where large numbers of people have lost out from the deindustrialisation and globalisation of the last few decades of neo-liberal economic policies, and where the educational system has not helped large proportions of the young to equip themselves for the new labour market. Increasing numbers in these disadvantaged groups were won over during the last few decades by the campaigns in parts of the print media, taken up by UKIP since the 1990s, linking their situations to the impact of immigration – uncontrollable because of the EU freedom of movement of labour principle. The wider Leave campaign built on that foundation in 2016, producing the geography displayed here.”

That conclusion of course goes beyond the finding that areas hard hit by globalisation tended to vote Leave, and adds an explanation that sees the press and politicians actively trying to link the experience of disadvantage to the issue of immigration. It is an argument I have also made. Unfortunately it is an argument that is very difficult to prove using regression analysis, because - as newspapers often argue - they may print just what sells newspapers, so any correlation does not imply causation.

It is also important to remember that the link between voting Leave and areas of deindustrialisation is in additional to the strong links with education and age. Education may fit in with a story where the anti-EU stance (to say bias does not do it justice) of most of the tabloid press is important, for obvious reasons. The same is true with age, as younger people are likely to get their information by other means than the tabloid press.   

There is another, very different, line of argument that tries to explain the Leave vote not in terms of class but psychology/culture. Eric Kaufmann finds simple correlations between voting Leave and authoritarianism. A story you can tell is that, for some at least, Brexit was a vote against not neoliberalism but social liberalism. The link between social liberalism and the EU is once again migration, which represents one more unwelcome change for social conservatives. Social conservatism and authoritarianism may also map more easily into nationalism and wanting to 'take control', and it was part of the tabloid 'grooming' to do exactly that. Social conservatism may also explain the importance of age and perhaps also education.

There is no reason why we need to choose between the economic and the social types of explanation. Kaufmann and Johnston et al can both be right. As Max Wind-Cowie says (quoted by Rick here):

“Bringing together the dissatisfied of Tunbridge Wells and the downtrodden of Merseyside is a remarkable feat, and it stems from UKIP’s empathy for those who have been left behind by the relentless march of globalisation and glib liberalism.”

Both these explanations see antagonism to the idea (rather than the actuality) of migration as the way an underlying grievance got translated into a dislike of the EU. But was immigration really so crucial? A widely quoted poll by Lord Ashcroft says a wish for sovereignty was more important. The problem here, of course, is that sovereignty - and a phrase like taking back control - is an all embracing term which might well be seen as more encompassing than just a concern about immigration. It really needs a follow-up asking what aspects of sovereignty are important. If we look at what Leavers thought was important, the “ability to control our own laws” seemed to have little to do with the final vote compared to more standard concerns, including immigration.

However there are other aspects of the Ashcroft poll that I think are revealing. First, economic arguments were important for Remain voters. The economic message did get through to many voters. Second, the NHS was important to Leave voters, so the point economists also made that ending free movement would harm the NHS was either not believed or did not get through to this group. Indeed “more than two thirds (69%) of leavers, by contrast, thought the decision “might make us a bit better or worse off as a country, but there probably isn’t much in it either way””. Whether they did not know about the overwhelming consensus among economists who thought otherwise, or chose to ignore it, we cannot tell.

Third, Leave voters are far more pessimistic about the future, and also tend to believe that life today is much worse than life 30 years ago. Finally, those who thought the following were a source of ill rather than good - multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, globalisation, the internet, the green movement and immigration - tended by large majorities to vote Leave. Only in the case of capitalism did as many Remain and Leave voters cite it as a source of ill. These results suggest that Leave voters were those left behind in modern society in either an economic or social way (or perhaps both).

Taking all this evidence into account it seems that the Brexit vote was a protest vote against both the impact of globalisation and social liberalism. The two are connected by immigration, and of course the one certainty of the Brexit debate was that free movement prevented controls on EU migration. But that does not mean defeat was inevitable, as Chris makes clear. Kevin O’Rourke points out that the state can play an active role in compensating the losers from globalisation, and of course in recent years there has been an attempt to roll back the state. Furthermore, as Johnston et al suggest, the connection between economic decline and immigration is more manufactured than real. Tomorrow I’ll discuss both the campaign and what implications this all might have.

[1] Please let me know if I missed any studies. One I found out about as this post was about to be published was this by Richard Mann.

Rolling Postscript: Studies I've seen since. This by Jo Michell (particularly on migration impact). Geoff Tily argues that London may be special.