Not at all related to any libertarian or other political view point.
There’s a huge literature for labor economics that will have a lot of theory on wages and employee-employer market workings.
Some of the more simple approaches is to assume wages and labor services are no different from any other price and service/good setting. You can add another layer here related to reservation wage which then puts the floor in. One might argue that some market failure situation exists that makes the reservation wage fail to bind market wages so government imposed minimum wage should be set to the appropriate reservation wage level. (Note, I am not aware of anyone actually making that argument but think one would find bits or even all of that in much of the literature.)
I think perhaps a more interesting line might be something of a mixed model where one analyzes the internal compensation/pay policies for the employer as a distributive problem rather than the allocative problem that often seems to underlie wage models. Then across the industry/sector you would see something of a market wage observed but the formation would be driven by something a bit different than the standard econ 101 type story. I’m also not aware of any model like this but would expect that at least some of the labor econ literature at least implicitly includes it.
Thanks! Yeah, IIUC (...and I don’t...) I’m attending a lot to the distributive aspect of labor relations (hence talking about bargaining), maybe I’ll read Rawls. And I’m interested in the equilibria that come from different ways of dealing with distributive justice.
If you’ve not read Hirshmann’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty I would add that to list of reading.
Perhaps another contextual box to put the question into might also be some of the theory of the firm literature—particularly for the large corporations to what extent are they as much market internally as external market participants. Not sure if there would be anything to glean from the internal transfer pricing literature but to the extent wages can be modeled as other prices some light might be present.
Not at all related to any libertarian or other political view point.
There’s a huge literature for labor economics that will have a lot of theory on wages and employee-employer market workings.
Some of the more simple approaches is to assume wages and labor services are no different from any other price and service/good setting. You can add another layer here related to reservation wage which then puts the floor in. One might argue that some market failure situation exists that makes the reservation wage fail to bind market wages so government imposed minimum wage should be set to the appropriate reservation wage level. (Note, I am not aware of anyone actually making that argument but think one would find bits or even all of that in much of the literature.)
I think perhaps a more interesting line might be something of a mixed model where one analyzes the internal compensation/pay policies for the employer as a distributive problem rather than the allocative problem that often seems to underlie wage models. Then across the industry/sector you would see something of a market wage observed but the formation would be driven by something a bit different than the standard econ 101 type story. I’m also not aware of any model like this but would expect that at least some of the labor econ literature at least implicitly includes it.
Thanks! Yeah, IIUC (...and I don’t...) I’m attending a lot to the distributive aspect of labor relations (hence talking about bargaining), maybe I’ll read Rawls. And I’m interested in the equilibria that come from different ways of dealing with distributive justice.
If you’ve not read Hirshmann’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty I would add that to list of reading.
Perhaps another contextual box to put the question into might also be some of the theory of the firm literature—particularly for the large corporations to what extent are they as much market internally as external market participants. Not sure if there would be anything to glean from the internal transfer pricing literature but to the extent wages can be modeled as other prices some light might be present.
Great, thank you!