Wage inequality in Germany after the minimum wage introduction

Thorsten Schank and Mario Bossler

VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: While monthly wage inequality in Germany continued to increase strongly until 2010, it recently returned to the level of the year 2000. We assess the role of the national minimum wage introduced in 2015. Unconditional quantile regressions combined with difference-indifferences show significant minimum wage effects of varying magnitudes along the lower half of the wage distribution. Employment dynamics cannot explain the effects along the wage distribution, implying strong wage increases among the existing workforce. Wage increases are not offset by decreasing social benefits. Overall, the minimum wage introduction can account for about half of the recent decrease in wage inequality

Keywords: minimum wage; inequality; wages; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/224543/1/vfs-2020-pid-39124.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Wage Inequality in Germany after the Minimum Wage Introduction (2023)
Working Paper: Wage Inequality in Germany after the Minimum Wage Introduction (2020)
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:vfsc20:224543

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().