Raising the Standard: Minimum Wages and Firm Productivity

This paper exploits the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in Britain and subsequent increases in the NMW to identify the effects of minimum wages on productivity. We find that the NMW increased average labour costs for companies that tend to employ low paid workers, both upon the introduction of the NMW and more recently following the Great Recession when many workers experienced pay freezes or wage cuts, but the NMW continued to rise. We find evidence to suggest that companies responded to these increases in labour costs by raising labour productivity. These labour productivity changes did not appear to come about via a reduction in firms' workforce or via capital-labour substitution. Rather they were associated with increases in total factor productivity, as theories of organisational change, training and efficiency wages would suggest.