Six years after the introduction of the minimum wage, the data allowed a first look at its medium-term effects. For the Minimum Wage Commission, we examined the introduction and the increases of 2017 and 2019, with data extending to mid-2021. The analysis was based on official regional-level data, linked to indicators of exposure to the minimum wage and evaluated using several variants of the difference-in-differences approach. In strongly affected regions, dependent employment was 0.6 per cent lower than in weakly affected regions, a quantitatively small effect that was almost entirely due to the decline in marginal employment. This decline had intensified compared with the first study, and in individual sectors such as construction and manufacturing, negative effects on employment subject to social insurance contributions then also emerged. The regional economic situation proved decisive: in high-growth regions, negative effects were absent, and towards the end of the observation period a slightly positive effect on employment subject to social insurance contributions even began to show there. The 2019 increase had additional negative effects, the 2017 increase did not. For the first time, the analysis period included the pandemic year 2020, whose consequences made it harder to interpret some of the findings.
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