Santa Monica’s Minimum Wage: Assessing the Living Wage Movement’s New Frontier

Richard H. Sander and E. Douglass Williams
Additional contact information
Richard H. Sander: University of California, Los Angeles
E. Douglass Williams: University of the South

Economic Development Quarterly, 2005, vol. 19, issue 1, 25-44

Abstract: Local campaigns to create high minimum wages in submetropolitan districts have become a growing part of the living wage movement. In this article, the authors examine the structure and likely effects of an ambitious minimum wage ordinance adopted by the Santa Monica City Council in 2001 but narrowly defeated in a citywide referendum in November 2002. Using a range of data sources, the authors find that the ordinance would have had negative, but surprisingly mixed, effects on local business sectors and highly perverse distributional effects. Apart from their merits as policy, local minimum wage laws raise important, little-studied questions for labor and urban economists.

Keywords: living wage; minimum wage; income inequality; local government wage mandates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891242404268705 (text/html)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecdequ:v:19:y:2005:i:1:p:25-44

DOI: 10.1177/0891242404268705

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development Quarterly
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().