Minimum wages are used globally as a tool to ensure minimum pay for low-income workers and to ultimately improve their living standards. However, despite the wide use of minimum wages, the impact of minimum wages on a range of market factors, including production, employment and poverty is not fully understood – even the impact on employment is not fully understood, despite a large body of evidence that spans across decades. This dissertation contributes to the minimum wage literature in a few ways. Firstly, the literature has emphasised that the market structure influences the impact of minimum wages. Chapter Two therefore provides an overview of the structure, concentration and farm dynamics in the agricultural sector – the sector that experienced a large minimum wage increase that is studied in Chapters Three and Four. The chapter shows that employment and revenue generation are concentrated among large farms, that potential barriers to entry exist in the sector and that small farms have the least stable operations and have the highest probabilities of exiting the market. They are therefore also likely to be more vulnerable to changes in labour market legislation. Secondly, within the literature studying the minimum wage-employment relationship, the main focus has been on changes in net changes to employment without understanding how firms adjust their workforce. Chapter Three investigates the impact of a large minimum wage hike in the South African agricultural sector on worker flows – entry and separation – and the combined result these flows have on employment growth rates. Chapter Three shows that employment growth for non-seasonal work decreased after the minimum wage increase which was driven mainly by lower entry rates in the short-run. This temporarily led to higher barriers to entry for non-seasonal work. Moreover, the lowest-paid seasonal workers were likely replaced with slightly more productive low-income workers. Within the context of high unemployment in South Africa, the trade-off between higher wages that workers received following the minimum wage hike and lower employment growth and higher barriers to entry in the short run need to be weighed up. While the minimum wage literature has established that enforcement plays an important role in determining the impacts of minimum wages, it has focused on local enforcement – such as if and how local authorities enforce minimum wage legislation. Chapter Four contributes to this literature by showing that external enforcement – via international private standards – matters for how minimum wages affect firms and worker decisions. This highlights another adjustment mechanism in response to minimum wages that has, to the best of my knowledge, not been studied before. Exporters that export to countries that require adherence to voluntary but de facto private standards – including compliance with local labour laws – need to decide whether to continue exporting and if so, to continue exporting to the same countries or divert trade to countries that have less stringent requirements on exporters. Chapter Four shows that some exporters temporarily divert trade away from export destinations where stringent private standards are in place that require adherence to minimum wage legislation. This dissertation shows how using administrative data can fill remaining gaps in the large minimum wage literature, especially where dynamics effects and international trade are concerned.