When Ecuador raised its monthly Unified Minimum Wage from $170 to $200 in 2008, it affected 35 percent of all private sector workers. We use this unexpected minimum wage hike under former president Rafael Correa to assess the labor market impacts of the minimum wage. We use an administrative dataset that covers all formal sector workers by month. Adopting a differences-indifferences approach at the firm level, we find that the minimum wage hike led to a decrease in labor demand in affected firms by 0.5 percent after one month and by 2.5 percent after four months. The decrease in labor demand resulted from both an increase in job separations and a slowdown in hiring. At the worker level, we find that the minimum wage hike led to a 2.2 percentage point decline in the probability of remaining employed after one month, and the treatment effect rose to 3.9 percentage points after four months. Last, we estimate the effects of the minimum wage hike on wage changes by wage bin throughout the monthly wage distribution. We find that, after one month, wages increased by 17 to 37 percent for workers who were being paid less than $200 and also uncover wage spillover effects up to the 77th percentile of the wage distribution.

Mobile money (MM) is the most promising tool to enable more individuals living in rural and marginalized communities into the banking sector. Although private companies in some developing countries have transitioned most of its users over to MM, it remains unclear if government-initiated programs would be as successful. By accessing a comprehensive data set of the first MM project to be initiated by a government, we tracked the behavior of users within the MM network. Temporal analysis of network representations of MM transactions shows how agents behave over time and how they react when given tax-incentives for the use of non-cash transactions. Tax-incentives had immediate positive effects on the economic activity of continuing users (number of transactions, mean and total value of transactions) and a marginal effect on their interconnectedness (number of partners and clustering). However, the tax-incentive distorted economic behavior and had a modest effect on the adoption and diffusion of MM over time at a high price tag. Implementation of these new technologies requires consideration of the peculiarity of the different actors and the expansion of the network over time, as well as the specific characteristics of each economy. These findings offer important lessons that would be valuable to other governments and policymakers considering MM.

When Ecuador raised its monthly Unified Minimum Wage from $170 to $200 in 2008, it affected 35 percent of all private sector workers. We use this unexpected minimum wage hike under former president Rafael Correa to assess the labor market impacts of the minimum wage. We use an administrative dataset that covers all formal sector workers by month. Adopting a differences-indifferences approach at the firm level, we find that the minimum wage hike led to a decrease in labor demand in affected firms by 0.5 percent after one month and by 2.5 percent after four months. The decrease in labor demand resulted from both an increase in job separations and a slowdown in hiring. At the worker level, we find that the minimum wage hike led to a 2.2 percentage point decline in the probability of remaining employed after one month, and the treatment effect rose to 3.9 percentage points after four months. Last, we estimate the effects of the minimum wage hike on wage changes by wage bin throughout the monthly wage distribution. We find that, after one month, wages increased by 17 to 37 percent for workers who were being paid less than $200 and also uncover wage spillover effects up to the 77th percentile of the wage distribution.

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