When you raise the minimum wage, restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor go up—but it’s not because the food or service got any better.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Higher Minimum Wages, Happier Customers? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Online Restaurant Ratings across the US
SSRN · 6312639
The Takeaway
It turns out that higher wages don't necessarily make existing staff provide better service; instead, the increased labor costs kill off the low-rated, poorly managed restaurants. The city's average rating rises simply because the 'bad' restaurants disappear, leaving only the high-quality survivors in the market.
From the abstract
This paper examines how increases in the minimum wage affect consumer perceptions of restaurants, as reflected in online ratings. Drawing on seven years of city-month panel data from TripAdvisor linked to detailed local minimum wage schedules, we exploit staggered minimum wage policy changes across contiguous counties in a difference-indifferences framework using novel counterfactual estimators and conventional two-way fixed effects. We find that, nationally, a minimum wage hike raises average c