We estimate the effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs using 138 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016 in the United States using a difference-in-differences approach. We first estimate the effect of the minimum wage increase on employment changes by wage bins throughout the hourly wage distribution. We then focus on the bottom part of the wage distribution and compare the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it to infer the employment effect. We find that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over the five years following the increase. At the same time, the direct effect of the minimum wage on average earnings was amplified by modest wage spillovers at the bottom of the wage distribution. Our estimates by detailed demographic groups show that the lack of job loss is not explained by labor-labor substitution at the bottom of the wage distribution. We also find no evidence of disemployment when we consider higher levels of minimum wages. However, we do find some evidence of reduced employment in tradeable sectors. We also show how decomposing the overall employment effect by wage bins allows a transparent way of assessing the plausibility of estimates.

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The authors use the occurrence of a large and geographically varying inflow of more than 2.5 million Syrian migrants to Turkey between 2012 and 2015 to study the effect of migration on local economies. They do not find adverse employment or wage effects for native-born Turkish workers overall or for those without a high school degree. These results are robust to a range of strategies to construct reliable control groups. To explain the findings, the authors document the importance of three migration-induced demand channels: the complementarity between native and migrant labor, housing demand, and increased entrepreneurial activities.

We assess the effect of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes such as employment, unemployment, and labor force participation for most workers affected by the policy. We apply modern machine learning tools to construct demographically-based treatment groups capturing around 75% of all minimum wage workers-a major improvement over the literature which has focused on fairly narrow subgroups where the policy has a large bite (e.g., teens). By exploiting 172 prominent minimum wages between 1979 and 2019 we find that there is a very clear increase in average wages of workers in these groups following a minimum wage increase, while there is little evidence of employment loss. Furthermore, we find no indication that minimum wage has a negative effect on the unemployment rate, on the labor force participation, or on the labor market transitions. Furthermore, we detect no employment or participation responses even for sub-groups that are likely to have a high extensive margin labor supply elasticity-such as teens, older workers, or single mothers. Overall, these findings provide little evidence for changing search effort in response to a minimum wage increase.

We assess the effect of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes such as employment, unemployment, and labor force participation for most workers affected by the policy. We apply modern machine learning tools to construct demographically-based treatment groups capturing around 75% of all minimum wage workers-a major improvement over the literature which has focused on fairly narrow subgroups where the policy has a large bite (e.g., teens). By exploiting 172 prominent minimum wages between 1979 and 2019 we find that there is a very clear increase in average wages of workers in these groups following a minimum wage increase, while there is little evidence of employment loss. Furthermore, we find no indication that minimum wage has a negative effect on the unemployment rate, on the labor force participation, or on the labor market transitions. Furthermore, we detect no employment or participation responses even for sub-groups that are likely to have a high extensive margin labor supply elasticity-such as teens, older workers, or single mothers. Overall, these findings provide little evidence for changing search effort in response to a minimum wage increase.