If Higher Minimum Wages Do Not Cut Employment, Where Do They Bite? Prices, Amenities, Automation and Firm Exit

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 29, 2026 · 1h 14m

When a government raises the statutory minimum wage by twenty percent and aggregate low-wage employment barely budges, does that mean the minimum wage is a free lunch? No—because an accounting identity requires that every pound of higher payroll cost must come from somewhere. We build the modern economics of minimum-wage incidence from first principles: Card and Krueger, Cengiz-Dube-Lindner-Zipperer bunching estimators, Burdett-Mortensen and Manning dynamic monopsony, Harasztosi and Lindner's 75/25 consumer-price vs profit split, Clemens's non-wage amenity and effort offsets, labor-labor and…