摘要：We exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1990 introduction of the UK
National Minimum Wage (NMW) to investigate the relationship between wages and
monitoring and to test for Efficiency Wages considerations in a low-wage sector,
the UK residential care homes industry. Our findings seem to support the
wage-supervision trade-off prediction of the shirking model, and that employers
didn't dissipate minimum wage rents by increasing work intensity or effort
requirements on the job. Estimation results suggest that higher wage costs were
more than offset by lower monitoring costs, and thus the overall evidence imply
that the NMW may have operated as an Efficiency Wage. These findings support
Efficiency Wage models used to explain a non-negative employment effect of the
Minimum Wage and provide an explanation of recent evidence from the care homes
sector that although the wage structure was heavily affected by the NMW
introduction, there were moderate employment effects.
关键词：Efficiency Wages, National Minimum Wage, Wage-supervision trade-off
