Abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of minimum wage increases on household consumption, focusing on Spain's 2019 minimum wage increase, which raised the floor on wages by an unprecedented 22.3% in a low-inflation environment. Leveraging high-frequency, confidential transaction data from point-of-sale devices and credit card payments at the municipal level, we exploit geographic variation in exposure to the reform to identify its effects. We find that the increase led to a significant rise of 4.5% in household consumption, with the largest gains concentrated in nonessential categories such as electronics, leisure, and spending at restaurants and hotels. We corroborate these findings using household-level data from the Spanish Household Budget Survey. Our findings can be rationalized by a simple model featuring nonhomothetic preferences.