Employment and distributional effects of Greece’s national minimum wage

This paper provides 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 2016-2020. Using a Difference-in-Differences strategy, we estimate unconditional quantile regressions that yield economically important effects up to the 40th quantile of the earnings distribution. Importantly, we find that this does not come at the expense of disemployment effects, either at the extensive or at the intensive margin. Interestingly, there is some evidence that an increase in the minimum wage intensity is correlated with higher female employment. We attribute this finding to the fact that female labour markets are usually less competitive