Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments July 28, 2023 erstellt
Beschreibung:
This paper examines the effects of a minimum wage on wage inequality and employment outcomes in China's ethnic minority regions and whether those effects vary for Han and ethnic minorities. Minimum wage data is combined with a proprietary datasource obtained from China's Household Ethnic Survey (CHES) project. County-level analysis reveals that a higher minimum wage reduces spatial wage inequality, especially for ethnic minorities, without affecting unemployment rates. Subsequent micro-level analysis provides some explanation for why there is no observed adverse effect on aggregate unemployment. First, quantile regression models reveal that higher minimum wages causes employers to make some adjustments to the number of hours worked by employees to help offset higher labor costs. Second, multinomial logit models show that a higher minimum wage promotes formalization of the labour market. The results are robust to alternate estimations that take into account both censoring and endogeneity. The findings help confirm that minimum wages not only reduce spatial inequality, but also induce non-wage benefits in a developing country context