Vor der Bundestagswahl: Argumente für Mindestlöhne überzeugen nicht

For the first time ever, all political parties represented in the German Bundestag are proposing some form of minimum wage regulation in their federal campaigns. After sketching an overview of the vast empirical literature on the employment effects of minimum wages, which has yet to come to a consensus, the paper concentrates on the most common theoretical arguments for the view that minimum wages need not reduce the employment levels of affected workers. The authors find that those arguments are either conceptually inconsistent or assume market characteristics that can hardly describe the reality of low-wage labour markets. In the end, minimum wages are a blunt instrument to reduce poverty among workers — its primary objective — because it benefits many that are not poor and does not address the most important determinant of poverty in Germany, namely unemployment. Copyright ZBW and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013