TY  - JOUR
A1  - Caliendo, Marco
A1  - Fedorets, Alexandra
A1  - Preuss, Malte
A1  - Schröder, Carsten
A1  - Wittbrodt, Linda
T1  - The short-run employment effects of the German minimum wage reform
JF  - Labour economics : an international journal
N2  - We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage ‘bites’ into the regional wage distribution, the stronger the regional labour market will be affected. In contrast to previous studies, we construct two regional bite indicators based upon detailed individual wage data from the Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) 2014 and combine it with administrative information on regional employment. Moreover, using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we are able to affirm the absence of anticipation effects and verify the assumption of a common trend in wages before the reform. In sum, we find only moderate negative effects on overall employment of about 140,000 (0.4%) jobs, which are mainly driven by a sharp decline of marginal employment (‘mini-jobs’), while we do not find pronounced significant effects for regular employment in most specifications. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests.
KW  - Minimum wage
KW  - Regional bite
KW  - Employment effects
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2018.07.002
SN  - 0927-5371
SN  - 1879-1034
VL  - 53
SP  - 46
EP  - 62
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -