Alexandra Hill

Ph.D. Student, Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis

Abstract: This paper investigates how the minimum wage and piece rate wages interact to affect worker productivity. Piece rate wages are a common payment type in industries where supervision is costly relative to directly measuring output. For piece rate workers, the minimum wage sets a lower bound on their hourly earnings. In this paper, I use timestamp and payroll data from a California strawberry producer to examine how a minimum wage change affects worker productivity in the short and long-run.