Everyone Is Treated: A Continuous Exposure Approach to the 2023 Minimum Wage Shock in Turkey

Turkey's 2023 minimum wage shock — a 54.7 percent increase in the first half of the year followed by a further 34.0 percent increase in the second half — raises an immediate empirical question that standard tools cannot answer: because the policy is national and simultaneous, no firm escapes it, leaving no untreated comparison group for conventional difference-in-differences methods. This paper addresses that constraint directly by adopting a continuous exposure design in the tradition of Card (1992), assigning firms a sectoral "dose" of minimum wage exposure and estimating an event-study specification around the 2023 shock using an administrative firm-year panel (GBS) covering 2006-2025 and approximately 24.7 million observations. High-exposure firms show a substantial post-shock divergence from low-exposure firms — as much as 26.5 log points lower employment and 19 to 23 log points higher real net sales — but pre-shock event-time coefficients are large and statistically significant as well, indicating a violation of parallel pre-trends that a robustness check rules out attributing to firm-scale composition. Rather than concealing this violation, the paper reports it openly and frames its results descriptively rather than causally, following the transparency practice established in a companion study of the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes. The paper's contribution is a working template for evaluating nationally simultaneous policy shocks without a control group, together with a transparent account of where its identifying assumptions do and do not hold.