The Effects of Living Wage Laws: Evidence from Failed and Derailed Living Wage Campaigns

Scott Adams () and David Neumark ()

No 11342, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities without a law, and also permit the separate estimation of the effects of living wage laws and living wage campaigns. We find that living wage laws raise wages of low-wage workers but reduce employment among the least-skilled, especially when the laws cover business assistance recipients or are accompanied by similar laws in nearby cities.

JEL-codes: J38 J58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Date: 2005-05
Note: LS
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11342.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effects of Living Wage Laws: Evidence from Failed and Derailed Living Wage Campaigns (2005)
Working Paper: The Effects of Living Wage Laws: Evidence From Failed and Derailed Living Wage Campaigns (2004)
Journal Article: The effects of living wage laws: Evidence from failed and derailed living wage campaigns (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11342

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11342
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().