Building the minimum wage: the distributional impact of Germany’s first sectoral minimum wage on wages and hours across different wage bargaining regimes

Pia Rattenhuber ()

Empirical Economics, 2014, vol. 46, issue 4, 1429-1446

Abstract: The first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment, blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation based on linked employer–employee data. Estimation results reveal a sizable positive impact on mean wages in East Germany, but no significant effect in West Germany. Size and significance of effects are neither homogeneous across wage regimes (individual vs. collective contracts) nor across the distribution. The patterns suggest a compression in the lower part of the wage distribution and spillover effects to wages where the minimum is not binding, even in West Germany, where the bite of the MW was low. No effects on hours of work or substitution between workers of different qualification levels are found. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Minimum wage; Wages and hours of work; Differences-in-differences-in-differences; Unconditional quantile regression; Construction sector; Linked employer–employee data; C21; J31; J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-013-0726-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:empeco:v:46:y:2014:i:4:p:1429-1446

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-013-0726-1

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().