The principal justification for minimum wage legislation resides in improving the economic condition of low-wage workers. Most previous analyses of the distributional effects of minimum wages have been confined to simulation exercises employing rather restrictive assumptions that guarantee the...

Common wisdom holds that the introduction of a non-binding minimum wage is irrelevant for actual wages and employment. Empirical and experimental research, however, has shown that the introduction of a minimum wage can raise even those wages that were already above the new minimum wage. In this...

We investigate minimum wage spillovers by exploiting the first-time introduction of a minimum wage within a quasi-experiment in a context with an extraordinary large bite: the German roofing industry. We find positive wage spillovers for medium-skilled workers with wages just above the minimum...

Solo self-employment is on the rise despite less favorable working conditions compared to traditional jobs. We show that the introduction of minimum wages in German industries led to an increase in the share of solo self-employment by up to 8.5 percentage points. We explain our findings within a...

Minimum wages generate an asymmetric pass-through of rm shocks across workers. We establish this result leveraging employer-employee data on Italian metalmanufacturing rms, which face di erent wage oors that vary within occupations. In response to negative rm productivity shocks, workers close...

This paper studies the effects of a first employee wage subsidy imple-mented in parts of Finland in 2007â 2011 using the universe of Finnishfirms. The subsidy, amounting to 30% of the wage costs of the firstemployee in the first year and 15% in the second, was targeted to en-trepreneurs without...