Abstract:This study examines the welfare implications of minimum wage hikes in Japan using suicide mortality as a proxy for negative well-being. The possibility of competing income and unemployment effects provides a motivation for an empirical investigation. Our difference-in-differences regression framework exploits a minimum wage policy reform in Japan that was implemented in 2008, which mandated prefectures to incrementally increase their minimum wages to local living wages. We find that the reform contributed to a decrease in suicides by 4.58% that is concentrated among demographic groups with greater exposure to minimum wages. An analysis of the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions (2004-2016) suggests that increases in earned income in the absence of sizable adverse effects on labor at the intensive and extensive margins among low-wage earners could be an important mechanism driving these results. The study highlights the importance of assessing various tradeoffs in economic policy for well-being.