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 made a hire, but those workers they did hire were paid a higher wage. However, the reduction in hiring was not large, even at the highest minimum wage imposed. In contrast, minimum wages substantially reduced hours-worked, across cells. Firms facing a higher minimum wage also hired more productive workers, which can explain, in part, the reduction in hours-worked: with more productive workers, projects were simply completed in less time. This labor-labor substitution margin of adjustment would presumably be less effective in equilibrium, if all firms sought out more productive workers. However, 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 labor-labor substitution towards more productive workers.