  The recent rise of sub-national minimum wage (MW) policies in the US has
resulted in significant dispersion of MW levels within urban areas. In this
paper, we study the spillover effects of these policies on local rental markets
through commuting. To do so, for each USPS ZIP code we construct a "workplace"
MW measure based on the location of its resident's jobs, and use it to estimate
the effect of MW policies on rents. We use a novel identification strategy that
exploits the fine timing of differential changes in the workplace MW across ZIP
codes that share the same "residence" MW, defined as the same location's MW.
Our baseline results imply that a 10 percent increase in the workplace MW
increases rents at residence ZIP codes by 0.69 percent. To illustrate the
importance of commuting patterns, we use our estimates and a simple model to
simulate the impact of federal and city counterfactual MW policies. The
simulations suggest that landlords pocket approximately 10 cents of each dollar
generated by the MW across directly and indirectly affected areas, though the
incidence on landlords varies systematically across space.
