Kronenberg Christoph, Jacobs Rowena, Zucchelli Eugenio
CINCH-Health Economics Research Center, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Germany.
SSM Popul Health. 2017 Aug 19;3:749-755. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2017.08.007. eCollection 2017 Dec.
Despite an emerging literature, there is still sparse and mixed evidence on the wider societal benefits of Minimum Wage policies, including their effects on mental health. Furthermore, causal evidence on the relationship between earnings and mental health is limited. We focus on low-wage earners, who are at higher risk of psychological distress, and exploit the quasi-experiment provided by the introduction of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to identify the causal impact of wage increases on mental health. We employ difference-in-differences models and find that the introduction of the UK NMW had no effect on mental health. Our estimates do not appear to support earlier findings which indicate that minimum wages affect mental health of low-wage earners. A series of robustness checks accounting for measurement error, as well as treatment and control group composition, confirm our main results. Overall, our findings suggest that policies aimed at improving the mental health of low-wage earners should either consider the non-wage characteristics of employment or potentially larger wage increases.
尽管相关文献不断涌现，但关于最低工资政策对更广泛社会福利的影响，包括对心理健康的影响，证据仍然稀少且参差不齐。此外，关于收入与心理健康之间关系的因果证据也很有限。我们关注的是心理困扰风险较高的低薪劳动者，并利用英国国家最低工资（NMW）引入所提供的准实验来确定工资上涨对心理健康的因果影响。我们采用差分模型，发现英国国家最低工资的引入对心理健康没有影响。我们的估计结果似乎不支持早期表明最低工资会影响低薪劳动者心理健康的研究发现。一系列考虑测量误差以及处理组和对照组构成的稳健性检验证实了我们的主要结果。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，旨在改善低薪劳动者心理健康的政策要么应考虑就业的非工资特征，要么可能需要更大幅度的工资上涨。
