The Effect of Recent Increases in the U.S. Minimum Wage: Results from Three Data Sources

John Addison (), McKinley L. Blackburn and Chad D. Cotti
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McKinley L. Blackburn: Department of Economics, Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, USA
Chad D. Cotti: Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, USA

Working Paper Series from The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact on earnings and employment of substantive increases in the minimum wage under the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. Against the backdrop of a thin contemporary literature offering mixed results, our study uses three different data sets, and three different estimation strategies for addressing geographically-disparate trends. Despite the concatenation of seemingly large wage increases and a soft labor market, our evidence is generally unsupportive of material disemployment effects among industrial and demographic groups typically associated with low-wage employment. Our results are consistent with minimum wage workers being concentrated in sectors of the economy for which the labor-demand response to wage increases is seemingly modest.

Keywords: minimum wages; disemployment; earnings; low-wage sectors; geographically-disparate employment trends; recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J2 J3 J4 J8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-lma
Date: 2012-07
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