The impact of minimum wage on automotive companies' performance

Abstract

This paper aims to verify the relationship between minimum wage growth and the financial indicators of automotive companies. As a hi-tech sector, the automotive industry is usually not expected to be affected by minimum wage policies. The introduction of the minimum wage in Germany and the dynamic development of the minimum wage in Eastern European countries make it possible to assess this relationship. German, Czech, Polish, and Slovak automotive company data was obtained from the Orbis database. Panel regression models were applied to test for dependencies. The paper detects the association between the growth of the minimum wage and the increase in personnel cost, which is next to the associations with several financial indicators at the company level. The identified impact is specific to small and medium-sized companies.