CERGAS Seminar "Age-dependent Minimum Wages and Health Outcomes: Evidence from the UK."

We examine the impact of age-based minimum wages on the health outcomes of young workers in the UK using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society (2016 - 2021) and exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) framework. By focusing on the health-related effects of minimum wage discontinuities, we consider the National Minimum Wage (NMW) regulation introduced in the UK in 1999 to examine how a possible exogenous increase in income may affect the health outcome of younger workers.
The UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) regulation provides a very good setting to identify the causal effects of minimum wage on health by exploiting an RDD framework. However, since the youth minimum wages can be described as a stepwise increasing function of a worker’s calendar age, we have to deal with multiple cutoffs when estimating our RDD models. We address this matter by adopting both a standard “normalizing and pooling” approach and the novel “cumulative multiple cutoffs” approach by Cattaneo et al. (2020, 2021).
In our empirical analysis, we consider as dependent variables two different measures of health, that is physical and mental health. Our main results suggest that the increase in minimum wage has a positive effect on the physical health of workers when they turn 21, but it does not have significant effects at the other age cutoffs. The magnitude of this effect is larger if we adopt the novel “cumulative multiple cutoffs” approach by Cattaneo et al. (2020, 2021) instead of the standard “normalizing and pooling” approach. Our findings remain robust across various specification tests and robustness checks.

Speaker:

Silvana Robone is Full Professor of Economic Policy (SECS P/02) at the Department of Law and Economic and Social Science (DIGSPES), University of Eastern Piedmont (Alessandria), and she is external affiliate of HEDG - Health, Econometrics and Data Group (University of York, UK), the Department of Economic and Finance (Catholic University, Milan, Italy), the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy (Bocconi University, Milan, Italy) and Hospinnomics (Paris School of Economics, France). Prof. Robone is also Vice-President and Member of the Board of Directors of CORIPE Piemonte.
Prof. Robone was awarded a Ph.D. in Economics jointly by the University of York and the University of Bologna. She has been employed from 2006 to 2012 as Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics (CHE), University of York, as Assistant Professor (Rtd A) at the Department of Economics, University of Bologna from 2012 to 2014, and as Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Insubria (Varese) until Jan 2024.  
Prof. Robone’s research interests are mostly focused on Health Economics. Results from her research activity have been published on journals such as the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (series A), Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, American Journal of Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, European Journal of Health Economic, Health Policy and International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics.

Link Zoom: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/97972137915?pwd=KVca7qwmzItjjw8wjkccf1GghcaHTt.1

Meeting: 979 7213 7915

Passcode: 247286

Lunch at the end of the meeting: for those willing to participate in person, click here before the 21st of May.