The Impact of the National Minimum Wage on Industry-Level Wage Bargaining in France

Denis Fougère (1, 2, 3) , Erwan Gautier (4, 5, 6) , Sébastien Roux (7, 8, 6)

1 LIEPP - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d'évaluation des politiques publiques (Sciences Po)
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research
4 LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique
5 TEPP - Travail, Emploi et Politiques Publiques
6 Banque de France - Banque de France
7 INED - Institut national d'études démographiques
8 CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique

This paper examines empirically how industry-level wage floors are set in French industry-level wage agreements and how the national minimum wage (NMW) interacts with industry-level wage bargaining. For this, we use a unique dataset containing about 48,000 occupation-specific wage floors, in more than 340 French industries over the period 2006-2014. We find that the NMW has a significant impact on the seasonality and on the timing of the wage bargaining process. Inflation, past sectoral wage increases and real NMW increases are the main drivers of wage floor adjustments; elasticities of wage floors with respect to these macro variables are 0.6, 0.3 and 0.25 respectively. Wage floor elasticities to inflation and to the NMW both decrease along the wage floor distribution but are still positive for all levels of wage floors.

Mots clés: minimum wage; collective bargaining; wages

Domaines: Economies et finances; Gestion et management

Denis Fougère, Erwan Gautier, Sébastien Roux. The Impact of the National Minimum Wage on Industry-Level Wage Bargaining in France. 2016. ⟨hal-01308722v2⟩