Small Businesses and the Minimum Wage∗ Jesse Wursten† Michael Reich‡ March 14, 2023 Abstract We provide the first causal analysis of the role of firm size on minimum wage effects in the U. [...] The QWI dataset provides data split by firm and worker dimensions, our analyses are based on data split by firm size and either the age and gender, or the education and gender of the worker. [...] For these reasons, we mainly use the CBP to analyse the impact of the minimum wage on establishment counts (not available in the QWI) and consider the wage and employment results as robustness tests. [...] The solid black line is a weighted OLS prediction of the relation between initial 1990 wages and the earnings elasticity.19 This line is downward sloping and close to zero at the right end of the initial wage distribution, suggesting earnings elasticities are larger in lower wage sectors and likely to be close to zero for sectors above the $268 threshold. [...] We use minimum wage variation since 1990 to conduct a stacked event study and deploy two datasets– the quarterly administrative data on pay and employment in the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) and the annual administrative data on pay and employment in County Business Patterns (CBP).
- Pages
- 28
- Published in
- United States of America
