Payroll, Revenue, and Labor Demand Effects of the Minimum Wage

We study the impact of the minimum wage hike in Seattle from $9.47 to$13 on wagebill, labor demand, and firm revenue using administrative data from the state of Washington. We show that the minimum wage affected businesses both at the intensive and extensive margins. At the intensive margin, businesses increased their labor costs and adjusted to the minimum wage by mildly reducing demand for low-wage jobs, but they largely did not pass the increase in labor costs to prices. At the extensive margin, the minimum wage led to higher rates of business exit and shifted the composition of entering businesses towards less labor-intensive businesses. Finally, we find that the extensive margin and the intensive margin effects were of the same order of magnitude, and were equally important for understanding the impacts of the minimum wage

How do Firms Respond to a Minimum Wage Hike?

This paper investigates how adjustment strategies to a minimum wage hike vary across firms, and what drives these differences. We analyze the short-term impacts of the 2015-2016 minimum wage hike in Seattle on wage bill, labor demand and firm revenue using the confidential data on firms from Unemployment Insurance records and gross revenue tax records in the State of Washington. Our preliminary results suggest that firms with high costs of compliance with the minimum wage hike cut jobs and hours to prevent their total labor costs from rising, while firms with low costs of compliance do not adjust their labor demand and instead incur an increase in total labor costs. Following these findings, we ask whether the differences in firms’ adjustment strategies are driven by firms’ initial productivity or by their ability to pass the minimum wage to consumers through price increases. Though our results are consistent with the small overall disemployment effect of minimum wage hikes found in the prior literature, they point out that the impact of a minimum wage hike might depend on the distribution of firm profitability and the nature of competition in the local markets