Minimum wages in the United States are jointly set by federal, state, and local governments, while many other countries have a single national policy. This paper studies the relative merits of centralized and decentralized policy setting. A binding policy is optimal if the benefits from redistribution outweigh the costs from migration, which are relatively steeper for local governments. Centralized policy, though uniform in practice, reduces horizontal migration externalities, which improves decentralized minimum wage setting. Our results therefore indicate that decentralized and centralized policy setting exhibit strategic complementarity; the extent of which depends on mobility and regional heterogeneity. We then calibrate a model of the continental US and find that joint policy setting leads to a small welfare gain over centralization, and closely resembles the social planner’s optimal policies.

美国的最低工资是由联邦，州和地方政府共同制定的，而其他许多国家/地区则有统一的国家政策。本文研究了集中式和分散式政策制定的相对优点。如果重新分配的收益大于迁移的成本，则约束性政策是最佳选择，对于地方政府而言，迁移的成本相对较高。集中政策虽然在实践中是统一的，但减少了横向移民的外部性，从而改善了分散式最低工资的设定。因此，我们的结果表明，分散和集中的政策制定具有战略互补性；其程度取决于流动性和区域异质性。然后，我们校准了美国本土的模型，发现联合制定政策会导致中央集权带来的少量福利收益，