The Economics of Gender-specific Minimum-wage Legislation
Abstract: During the 1910s, twelve U.S. states passed and implemented the country’s first minimum-wage laws. They covered only female employees, often in a subset of industries. We study the impact of this regulation using full-count Census data. Our identification strategy compares county-industry trends in county-pairs that straddle state borders. We find that female employment decreased by at least 3.1% at the county-industry level. Across counties, we find that the own-wage elasticity of labor demand varies from around –1.6 to 0.8 as a function of the local cross-industry concentration. Affected female workers switch industries or drop out of the labor force. The latter channel is driven exclusively by married women. We document a rise in male labor demand, and we investigate the channels of substitution between men and women. While on average men and women are gross substitutes, we find evidence that the margin of substitution is driven by the replacement of women in low-rank occupations with men in middle- or high-rank occupations
