 Disentangling the Minimum Wage Puzzle: An Analysis of Worker Accessions and Separations from Longitudinal Matched Employer-Employee Data SetPedro Portugal (pportugal@bportugal.pt) and Ana Rute Cardoso Working Papers from Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department Abstract: Changes in the legislation in mid-80s in Portugal provide remarkably good conditions for analysis of the employment effects of mandatory minimum wages, as the minimum wage increased very sharply for a very specific group of workers. Relying on a matched employer-employee panel dataset, we model gross worker flows - accessions and separations - in continuing firms, as well as in new firms and those going out of business, using a count regression model applied to proportions. Employment trends for teenagers, the affected group, are contrasted against older workers, before and after the rise in the youth minimum wage. The major effect on teenagers of a rising minimum wage is the reduction of separations from the employer, which compensates for the reduction of accessions to new and continuing firms. In this sense, our results can reconcile some of the previous evidence that has been presented in the empirical literature when analyzing the aggregate impact of the minimum wage on youth employment without decomposing it by type of worker flow. JEL-codes: D21 J23 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w200208 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department Contact information at EDIRC. |
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