This paper provides empirical evidence that firms’ internal organization and associated pay policies shape the propagation of minimum wage spillovers. Rigid, tournament-like firms use between-level pay differentials to incentivize workers and respond to minimum wage hikes by raising wages up the hierarchy, amplifying spillovers. Flexible firms rely more on individual wage-setting and can limit spillovers. Using rich administrative employer-employee data from Portugal, I construct measures of firm rigidity to examine how organizational structure shapes the strength of spillovers. Spillovers from the minimum wage reach the 47th percentile of the wage distribution, and represent around 40% of the direct effect on minimum wage workers. I show that spillovers are up to 40% stronger in rigid firms. I build a simple model of firm organization and pay policies that helps rationalize these findings. The result has broad implications for a wide range of shocks that shift relative pay within firms.

This paper studies contract splitting - the act of splitting contracts into multiple smaller ones - as a mechanism of manipulation in public procurement. Leveraging the procurement administrative registry in Portugal and exploiting a reform that lowered discretion thresholds, we find that contract splitting is the main mechanism of manipulation. Buyers split to circumvent competitive requirements, more so for goods and services than for less divisible construction works. We discuss the implications of contract splitting for commonly used bunching estimators, documenting the existence of a splitting-induced bias.

This article estimates a discrete-time proportional hazards model to study firm survival in thte Portuguese Tourism sector. While tourism is among the most volatile sectors in times of uncertainty, tourism-associated firms are remarkably resilient.