Employment and Distributional Effects of Greece's National Minimum Wage

Abstract

This paper explores the short-run effects of minimum wage policies on the distribution of earnings and employment. We exploit the variation in the “bite” of the minimum wage across region-industry cells, employing data from the Greek Labour Force Survey over the period 2015–2020. Using a Difference-in-Differences strategy, we estimate unconditional quantile regressions that yield economically important effects, at the bottom end of the earnings distribution. In particular, the estimated coefficients suggest a 14% and 7% rise in the wages for workers concentrated around the 10th and the 20th percentile, respectively. Importantly, we find that this does not come at the expense of disemployment effects, either at the extensive or at the intensive margin.