From a recent NBER paper (quoting from an earlier draft):
As theory would suggest, we find robust evidence that the impact of the minimum wage depends on how close a restaurant is to the margin of exit, proxied by its rating. Looking at city-level minimum wage changes in the San Francisco Bay Area (the “Bay Area”), we present two main findings. First, at all observed minimum wage levels, restaurants with lower ratings are more likely to exit, suggesting that they are less efficient in the economic sense. Moreover, lower rated restaurants are disproportionately affected by minimum wage increases. In other words, the impact of the minimum wage on exit is most pronounced among restaurants that are closer to the margin of exit.
…Our results suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to an 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant, but no impact for five-star restaurants (the point estimate is in fact negative, suggesting that the likelihood of exit might even decrease for five-star restaurants, but the estimate is not statistically different from zero). These effects are robust to a number of different specifications, including controlling for time-varying county characteristics that may influence both minimum wage policies and restaurant demand, city-specific time trends to account for preexisting trends, as well as county-year fixed effects to control for spatial heterogeneity in exit trends.
…Overall, our findings shed on the economic impact of the minimum wage. Basic theory predicts that the minimum wage will cause firms that cannot adjust in other ways to cover their increased costs to exit the market. We find that lower rated firms (which are already closer to the margin of exit) are disproportionately impacted by the minimum wage. After a minimum wage increase, they are more likely to exit the market altogether and more likely to raise their prices (pg. 2-5).
This matches previous research, which finds that labor-intensive restaurants tend to exit and make room for capital-intensive restaurants.[ref]This same research finds that consumers bear the costs of minimum wage hikes (as my last post also showed). Lastly, the authors found “a short-run disemployment effect of just under −0.1 that likely grows by three to five times in the long run” (pg. 71).[/ref]