The Employment Effects of Gender-Specific Minimum WageRiccardo Marchingiglio and Mikhail Poyker No 290, Working Papers from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State Abstract: During the 1910's, twelve states passed and implemented the first minimum-wage laws in the history of the United States. These laws were applying to specific industries and only to female employees. This paper studies the employment impact of these gender-specific minimum-wage laws, using full count Census data from 1880 to 1930. We apply a triple-difference strategy exploiting variation across states, industries, and time, to both the full sample of U.S. counties and to the restricted group of contiguous county pairs. We estimate separate models for male and female adults, and find that these laws led to a decrease in female employment and an increase in the employment of adult men. Guided by a simple labor demand setting, we estimate the average elasticity of substitution between male and female labor, and show that the two inputs were, on average, gross substitutes. We provide suggestive evidence of a long-run impact of gender-specific minimum-wage laws on female labor force participation, after the Fair Labor Standards Act. Keywords: Minimum wage; labor demand; gender gap (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:290 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State Contact information at EDIRC. |
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