Political Commitment, Policy Consequences, and Moral Beliefs: Survey Evidence on the Minimum Wage

Agarwal Neha () and David Fairris
Additional contact information
Agarwal Neha: Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2023, vol. 23, issue 1, 1-54

Abstract: Does information regarding the economic consequences of a minimum wage affect the level of support for or opposition to minimum wage policy? We conduct an online survey of 2242 US respondents to study this question. We randomly assign differing, empirically plausible estimates of minimum wage impacts on three outcomes—employment, the distribution of minimum wage gains to households, and comparative impacts of a government transfer program versus a minimum wage— in order to explore the relationship between minimum wage consequences and political commitment. Our results show that while political commitment is indeed influenced by information on the policy’s consequences, such information rarely leads to fundamental changes in political commitment. This is consistent with findings in the larger literature on the effects of information provision on political commitment. We offer a novel explanation for such findings by surveying respondents on their moral beliefs regarding the minimum wage, focusing on the extent to which these beliefs are consequentialist or non-consequentialist in nature. We find that non-consequentialist moral beliefs are prevalent among survey respondents and that the more intense are these beliefs, the less likely people are to be swayed by the policy’s consequences.

Keywords: minimum wage; consequences; moral beliefs; political commitment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2022-0150 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
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:bpj:bejeap:v:23:y:2023:i:1:p:1-54:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2022-0150

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().