The short-run employment effects of the German minimum wage reform

Marco Caliendo, Alexandra Fedorets, Malte Preuss, Carsten Schröder and Linda Wittbrodt

Labour Economics, 2018, vol. 53, issue C, 46-62

Abstract: We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage ‘bites’ into the regional wage distribution, the stronger the regional labour market will be affected. In contrast to previous studies, we construct two regional bite indicators based upon detailed individual wage data from the Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) 2014 and combine it with administrative information on regional employment. Moreover, using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we are able to affirm the absence of anticipation effects and verify the assumption of a common trend in wages before the reform. In sum, we find only moderate negative effects on overall employment of about 140,000 (0.4%) jobs, which are mainly driven by a sharp decline of marginal employment (‘mini-jobs’), while we do not find pronounced significant effects for regular employment in most specifications. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests.

Keywords: Minimum wage; Regional bite; Employment effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J31 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (80)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Short-Run Employment Effects of the German Minimum Wage Reform (2017)
Working Paper: The Short-Run Employment Effects of the German Minimum Wage Reform (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:53:y:2018:i:c:p:46-62

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2018.07.002

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