First to $ 15: Alberta's minimum wage policy on employment by wages, ages, and places

Sebastian Fossati and Joseph Marchand

No 54, CLEF Working Paper Series from Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo

Abstract: Most minimum wage studies are identified on small, plentiful, and expected wage changes, spread out over time. A recent set of changes have instead been large, unexpected, and quick, following the "Fight for $ 15" movement. Alberta is the first state or province to have this $ 15 minimum wage, with an unexpectedly large increase (47%) occurring over a short 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, reaching past the 15th percentile, but not all remained employed. Employment losses were found mostly among younger workers, at magnitudes similar to previous elasticities. Newer to the literature, regional employment losses were found mostly outside of Alberta's two main cities, but youth employment losses were similar between urban and non-urban areas, with an urban older worker offset.

Keywords: employment; Fight for $ 15; geography; minimum wage; synthetic control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J38 J48 J82 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/268380/1/1831506378.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: First to $15: Alberta's Minimum Wage Policy on Employment by Wages, Ages, and Places (2023)
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:zbw:clefwp:54

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CLEF Working Paper Series from Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().