Senior Thesis Defense · Department of Economics
Minimum Wage and the Teen Labor Market
Evidence from border-county pairs, 2009–2023. Presented by Elena Kowalski to the Undergraduate Thesis Committee, Spring 2026.
Evidence from border-county pairs, 2009–2023. Presented by Elena Kowalski to the Undergraduate Thesis Committee, Spring 2026.
The employment question, how the design isolates the minimum-wage effect from other local shocks, and what 316 border-county pairs show.
Comparing all treated and untreated states implies a −0.15 teen employment elasticity. Restricting comparisons to adjacent counties that share a labor market narrows that to −0.02 — well within sampling noise.
The design pairs each minimum-wage county with its contiguous neighbor across a state border, so local labor-demand shocks — weather, retail openings, highway construction — are shared by construction.
Employment comes from QCEW county records linked to state and local minimum-wage schedules, restricted to teen-heavy sectors: retail and food service.
Extends the Dube-Lester-Reich design six years past its original sample, through three federal non-adjustment years and 41 state-level increases.
Splits establishments by employee count. Job loss concentrates in firms under 20 employees; larger employers show no detectable effect.
Traces employment for eight quarters around each increase, ruling out anticipation effects and pre-existing divergent trends.
Border-pair synthetic-control estimate for teen employment in treated counties, indexed to the quarter before each minimum-wage increase (Q0 = 100).
Link county-level QCEW employment records to every state and local minimum-wage schedule change, 2009–2023.
Match each treated county to its closest untreated neighbor across a state line, following the contiguous-pair method.
Run quarter-by-quarter fixed-effects regressions with pair-by-time controls to isolate the minimum-wage effect.
Re-run under placebo dates, alternate bandwidths, and a synthetic-control specification to check the estimate survives.
The Estimate Holds Only for Increases Below $12/hr