Employment Effects of California's Fast Food Minimum Wage: Evidence from the QCEW and QWI
California recently raised its minimum wage in the fast-food sector from $16.00 to $20.00 per hour. We present one-year and two-year fixed-horizon estimates of the effects of this policy on California’s limited-service restaurant employment using data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) and the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI). After one year, our median estimates show that employment declines by 3 percent in the QCEW and 1.5 percent in the QWI relative to the counterfactual. After two years, both data sets show a decline of about 3.5 percent. We discuss evidence from several other recent papers on the employment effects of this policy.
The current version of this paper (34033) is a revision of "Did California's Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment?", distributed in July 2025. NBER paper 35171 includes a discussion of the results in that paper. This version includes a discussion of the results in 35171, as does NBER paper 35931 by the same authors.
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Copy CitationJeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, Jonathan Meer, and Joshua D. Nguyen, "Employment Effects of California's Fast Food Minimum Wage: Evidence from the QCEW and QWI," NBER Working Paper 34033 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34033.Download Citation
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