Price effects of minimum wages: Evidence from the construction sector in East and West Germany
Thomas Werner,
Friedrich L. Sell and
David C. Reinisch
No 2013,4, Working Papers in Economics from Bundeswehr University Munich, Economic Research Group
Abstract:
In this paper, the authors present a new approach to estimate the impact of a minimum wage on the labor market of the construction sector in Germany. Instead of estimating the effect on employment, the authors focus on the change of prices on a firm level in order to differentiate between a competitive and a monopsonistic structured labor market. The composition of the sector-specific labor market serves again as a basis to evaluate whether the consequences of the minimum wage can be taken as economically advantageous or disadvantageous. Using firm data monthly conducted by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, the estimations show that the minimum wage did have a different impact in East and West Germany. In East Germany, we find significant positive price effects of the minimum wage which exclude the possibility of positive employment effects due to monopsonistic structures. On the contrary, our results indicate a competitive sectorspecific labor market and declining employment. In contrast, there was no significant price reaction observed for West Germany. The minimum wage seems too low compared to the wages paid in the West German construction sector. Therefore, the introduction of the minimum wage cannot be assumed to be binding.
Keywords: labor market; minimum wage; employment effects; construction industry; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J38 J42 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/87732/1/770657168.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ubwwpe:20134
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers in Economics from Bundeswehr University Munich, Economic Research Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().