American Economic Review Vol. 115 No. 1 2025
Price Floors and Employer Preferences: Evidence from a Minimum Wage Experiment
Abstract
Firms posting job openings in an online labor market were randomly assigned minimum hourly wages. When facing a minimum wage, fewer firms hired, but those they did hire paid higher wages. Hoursworked fell substantially. Treated firms shifted to hiring more productive workers. Using the platform's imposition of a market-wide minimum wage after the experiment, I find that many of the experimental results also hold in equilibrium, including the substitution towards more productive workers. However, there was also a large reduction in the number of jobs posted for which the minimum wage would likely bind.
- DOI
- 10.1257/aer.20170637
- Volume
- 115
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 117-146
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref