Evidence of the Unintended Labor Scheduling Implications of the Minimum Wage
利用一家时尚零售连锁店的高粒度数据，研究发现最低工资每增加1美元，虽然总工时变化不大，但每周排班工人数增加27.7%，工人周工时减少19.4%，并降低了排班稳定性，可能损害工人福利。
Problem definition: The effect of the minimum wage is an important yet controversial topic that has received attention for decades. Our study is the first to take an operational lens and empirically study the impact of the minimum wage on firms’ scheduling practices. Methodology/results: Using a highly granular data set from a chain of fashion retail stores, we estimate that a $1 increase in the minimum wage, although having a negligible impact on the total labor hours used by the stores, leads to a 27.7% increase in the number of workers scheduled per week, but a 19.4% reduction in weekly hours per worker. For an average store in California, these changes translate into four extra workers and five fewer hours per worker per week. Such scheduling adjustment not only reduces the total wage compensation per worker but also reduces workers’ eligibility for benefits. We also show that the minimum wage increase reduces the consistency of weekly and daily schedules for workers. For example, the absolute (relative) deviation in weekly hours worked by each worker increases by up to 32.9% (6.6%) and by up to 9.7% (2.1%) in daily hours, as the minimum wage increases by $1. Managerial implications: Our study empirically identifies and highlights a new operational mechanism through which increasing the minimum wage may negatively impact worker welfare. Our further analysis suggests that the combination of the reduced hours, lower eligibility for benefits, and less consistent schedules (that resulted from the minimum wage increase) may substantially hurt worker welfare, even when the overall employment at the stores stay unchanged. By better understanding the intrinsic tradeoff of firms’ scheduling decisions, policy makers can better design minimum wage policies that will truly benefit workers. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1212 .