 Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm ExitDara Lee Luca () and
Michael Luca ()
No 17-088, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School Abstract: We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the minimum wage at the city level. We find that the impact of the minimum wage depends on whether a restaurant was already close to the margin of exit. Restaurants with lower ratings are closer to the margin of exit at all observed minimum wage levels, and are disproportionately driven out of business by increases to the minimum wage. Our point estimates suggest that a one dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating on Yelp), but has no discernible impact for a 5-star restaurant (on a 1 to 5 star scale). Looking at data from delivery orders, we find that lower rated restaurants also increase prices in response to minimum minimum wage increases. Overall, our analysis also highlights how digital data can be used to shed new light on labor policy and the economy. Pages: 44 pages Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:17-088 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School Contact information at EDIRC. |
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