First to $15: Alberta’s Minimum Wage Policy on Employment by Wages, Ages, and Places

Sebastian Fossati and Joseph Marchand

ILR Review, 2024, vol. 77, issue 1, 119-142

Abstract: Most minimum wage studies are identified on small, plentiful, mostly expected wage changes, spread out over time. A recent set of changes have instead been large, rapid, and unexpected, following the “Fight for $15†movement. Alberta is the first North American province, state, or territory to have this $15 minimum wage, with an unexpectedly large increase (47%) occurring over a short time horizon (3 years). The employment effects of this policy are estimated using a synthetic control approach on Labour Force Survey data. Similar to the existing literature, workers moved up the wage distribution, increment by increment, but with a higher distributional reach. Employment losses occurred at similar elasticities, but with large level changes, mostly among younger workers. Newer to the literature, regional employment losses were found in four of the five non-urban economic regions, but not in Alberta’s two main cities, showing the significance and nuance of regional heterogeneity.

Keywords: employment; Fight for $15; geography; minimum wage; synthetic control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00197939231213064 (text/html)

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:sae:ilrrev:v:77:y:2024:i:1:p:119-142

DOI: 10.1177/00197939231213064

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().