Reconciling Facts with Fiction, or: A Theoretical Speculation of why the Minimum Wage has no Discernible Effect on Employment

There has long been a discussion about the employment impact of minimum wages and this discussion has recently been renewed with the introduction of an economy-wide, binding minimum wage in Germany in 2015. In traditional reasoning, based on the allocation-based approach of modern labour market economics, it has been suggested that the impact is clearly negative on the assumption of a competitive labour market and clearly positive on the assumption of a monopsony-based labour market.