REP Research Seminar - Presenting in person - Tobias Seidel, Professor of Economics from the University of Duisburg-Essen. Title "Optimal minimum wages in spatial economies"

This is an internal seminar and attendees should use their University email account to join the meeting if they are joining via MS Teams. You are welcome to share this invite internally but please do not share it beyond the University. Please direct any enquiries from those outside of the University to: repschooloffice@reading.ac.uk.

Bio: Tobias Seidel is Professor of Economics at the Mercator School of Management (MSM) of the University of Duisburg-Essen. He earned his PhD at LMU Munich where he also spent one post-doc year. After his second post-doc year at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he moved to ETH Zurich before joining the MSM in 2012.

His research interests are international economics, regional economics, public economics, and development economics. His work comprises theoretical and empirical work, both reduced-form and structural. Research topics include labour market rigidities in the global economy, credit frictions, place-based policies and regional migration. His current research focuses on structural estimation of spatial models. He is a member of the CESifo Research Network and CRED.

Abstract: We develop a quantitative general-equilibrium framework for the normative evaluation of minimum wages in spatial economies with monopsonistic labour markets. We quantify the model for German micro-regions and successfully over-identify its predictions against the effects of the 2015 German minimum wage observed in data. Simulating the model, we find that at low levels, spatially blind national minimum wages can increase welfare and spatial equity simultaneously. At higher levels, however, welfare gains are traded against employment losses and spatial inequality. Because regional minimum wages are not spatially blind, they can increase employment and welfare in a spatially neutral manner.