High Minimum Wages and the Monopsony Puzzle cover

2.2 The range of these policies among exposed groups To provide further context for the substantial scope of these policies, we consider two commonly- applied metrics: the ratio of the minimum wage to the median wage, and the fraction of workers earning less than the upcoming minimum wage (the ”bite”). [...] The first quartile denotes the counties with the lowest average earnings and the fourth quartile denotes those with the highest earnings.39 Unsurprisingly, the minimum wage effects on weekly earnings are considerably higher in the lowest wage quartile: 23.5 percent in Panel A of Table 3 versus 16.7 percent in Panel A of Table 2 for the full sample of treated counties, and 22.7 percent in Panel B o. [...] Consistent with a monopsony model, the point estimates for employment effects are positive and largest in the lowest wage counties: 16.8 percent in the lowest quartile in Panel C of Table 3, versus 8 percent in the highest quartile of the full sample in Panel C of Table 3; and 17.6 percent in the lowest quartile versus 11.9 percent in the highest quartile in Panel D of Table 3.40 The employment ef. [...] Moreover, the right panels of Online Appendix Figure B.2 show that the impact of our pandemic-related employment correction steadily decreased after the onset of the pandemic, while the employment effects in Figures 4 and 5 steadily increased after the onset of the pandemic.41 We also find positive employment effects among teens that begin well before the pandemic and continue throughout the treat. [...] The large negative bars just below the new minimum wage indicate the large share of jobs that were bunched below the new minimum wage and the decline in the share of such jobs after the implementation of the new minimum wage.