earticle

영어

Minimum wage has been a contentious issue in South Korea. Recently the minimum wage standard rapidly increased as a part of response to sluggish wage growth and a diverging trend of economic inequality. Rapid increase of minimum wage raised concern on job displacement in the low-wage sectors. Particularly, the youth may be a vulnerable group to unintended effect of rapid increase of minimum wage. The study aims to identify the region-specific effect of minimum wage on youth employment at a provincial level in South Korea. Although the minimum wage of South Korea uniformly applied to all regions, we assume that the effect of minimum wage would differ from region to region because of different individual characteristics as well as regional labor market conditions. We employed the multi-level logit approach to take into account two levels of features. This analysis provided empirical findings about some region-varying responses to minimum wage change. The youth in non-metro provinces, female youth, and those with two-year college eduction attainment are more vulnerable to the negative effect of minimum wage.