雅思阅读 140: Does the Minimum Cost Jobs?（最低工资是否以就业为代价？）

改编自 NBER / Arindrajit Dube 等研究（2024-2026）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32878/w32878.pdf

Reading Passage

A. Few questions in economics have been argued as hard, or for as long, as the effect of a legal wage floor on employment. The textbook answer is elegant and familiar: if you force employers to pay more for low-skilled labour, they will hire less of it. Demand curves slope downward, after all. Raise the price, and people buy less. For much of the twentieth century this was the consensus, and estimates of how many jobs a minimum-wage rise would destroy were produced with apparent confidence. Then, in 1992, something happened in New Jersey. The state raised its minimum wage by nearly a fifth, while neighbouring Pennsylvania did not. Two young economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, saw in the difference a natural experiment, and what they found did not fit the textbook. Fast-food employment in New Jersey did not fall relative to Pennsylvania; if anything, it edged up. The controversy that followed has shaped labour economics ever since, and it is nowhere near settled. Card would much later be awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work that, in part, grew directly out of that New Jersey telephone survey.

B. The Card and Krueger study was simple in design and radical in implication. They telephoned hundreds of fast-food restaurants on both sides of the state line before and after the increase, and compared the change in jobs in New Jersey with the change in eastern Pennsylvania. Because the two sides shared customers, suppliers and weather, the only meaningful difference between them was the policy. This "difference-in-differences" trick has become the workhorse method of empirical labour economics. Their finding — no disemployment, perhaps even a small rise in jobs — flew in the face of orthodoxy, and it drew a fierce reply. Critics, using payroll records instead of telephone surveys, argued that the original numbers were noisy and that once better data were used, a modest negative effect appeared. The debate was never really about New Jersey fast food alone; it was about whether competitive-market theory was the right lens through which to see the labour market. The New Jersey rise took the state floor from four dollars and a quarter to five dollars and five cents, an increase of roughly nineteen per cent.

C. Why might a wage floor not destroy jobs? The answer favoured by Card, Krueger and their intellectual heirs turns on the idea that low-wage employers are not price-takers. In a town with one big warehouse, one hospital or one fast-food market, an employer with a little power over wages may keep pay below the competitive level precisely because raising it would draw in more applicants than the firm needs. A modest minimum-wage law can then push the wage up toward — not above — what the market would pay in a properly competitive world, with little or no loss of jobs. Higher pay may also reduce turnover, saving recruitment and training costs, and may make workers more attentive on the job. On this reading, a moderate wage floor does not fight the market; it corrects a particular market failure. The competing view, associated with economists such as Neumark and Wascher, holds that teenagers and the least skilled really are on the downward-sloping part of the demand curve, and that pushing their wage up prices them out. Their influential review of the older literature found that the most credible studies tended to show small negative effects concentrated on the least experienced workers.

D. A generation later, the empirical picture has broadened. A recent survey by leading minimum-wage researchers, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, reviews dozens of modern studies that exploit state and city increases over the past two decades. The weight of the evidence, in their reading, suggests that modest increases within the range actually tried in the United States have had small to zero effects on employment in the low-wage sectors most affected, while producing clear gains in earnings at the bottom. One recent analysis covering more than a decade of city and state rises — a kind of giant natural experiment running from 2013 to 2025 — reached the same broad conclusion: wages at the bottom rose, but measurable job losses in the target sectors did not materialise. Prices, it is true, rose modestly — a Californian study found that restaurant prices climbed by about two per cent after a local minimum-wage rise, a pass-through of roughly sixty per cent of the added labour cost. The remainder of the cost was absorbed by thinner profit margins rather than by further price rises. The study's authors caution that prices were tracked only two quarters after the policy, so longer-run pass-through may differ.

E. That is not to say the debate is over. The consensus, such as it is, applies to moderate increases within the range already tried. Whether a very large jump — say, to fifteen dollars an hour in a low-wage, low-cost region — would have the same benign effect is genuinely uncertain, and few natural experiments have pushed that far. Effects on hours worked, on training opportunities, and on the very lowest-skilled workers remain open questions. The deeper point, though, is that the old confidence has gone. Economists no longer argue about whether a wage floor always destroys jobs; they argue about how big an increase, in what kind of labour market, produces how much effect. For the policy-maker, the lesson is neither triumphant nor despairing: the minimum wage is a tool, not a weapon. Set within reasonable bounds, and alongside policies that support training and search, it can lift the lowest wages without the disemployment the textbooks once promised. The remaining disagreement, in other words, is less about whether the tool works at all than about where its edge lies.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The textbook prediction and the New Jersey shock ii. How Card and Krueger designed their study iii. Why a wage floor might not destroy jobs iv. The modern, broadened evidence v. How to calculate a demand curve vi. Where the consensus ends and uncertainty remains vii. Why Pennsylvania raised its minimum wage

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What did Card and Krueger find in New Jersey fast food? A. Employment fell sharply relative to Pennsylvania. B. Employment did not fall relative to Pennsylvania; it may even have risen slightly. C. All restaurants closed. D. Workers were replaced by machines.

6. What is "difference-in-differences"? A. Comparing two prices in one restaurant. B. Comparing the change in New Jersey with the change in a similar, untreated neighbouring area. C. Subtracting two years of inflation. D. A way of calculating payroll taxes.

7. Why might a minimum wage not destroy jobs, according to the monopsony view? A. Because workers do not care about wages. B. Because employers with some wage-setting power may already pay below competitive levels, so a floor corrects this. C. Because the government prints money. D. Because fast food is unprofitable anyway.

8. What did the Californian study find about prices? A. Restaurant prices fell sharply. B. Prices rose by about two per cent, passing through roughly 60% of the added labour cost. C. Prices did not change at all. D. Prices doubled.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The textbook competitive model predicts that raising a wage floor will reduce employment.
10. Card and Krueger studied restaurants in California and Oregon.
11. Modern evidence suggests that moderate minimum-wage rises within the range actually tried have had small to zero effects on low-wage employment.
12. Economists now agree that very large minimum-wage rises have no job-loss effect anywhere.
13. David Card was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2021.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Card and Krueger's design compared the change in fast-food employment in New Jersey with that in neighbouring (14) __________, treating the state-line contrast as a (15) __________ experiment.

答案与解析

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