The Impact of Recent State and Local Minimum Wage Increases on Nursing Facility Employment

Peter McHenry () and Jennifer M. Mellor
Additional contact information
Jennifer M. Mellor: William & Mary

Journal of Labor Research, 2022, vol. 43, issue 3, No 2, 345-368

Abstract: Abstract Various U.S. states and municipalities raised their mandated minimum wages between 2017 and 2019. In some areas, minimum wages became high enough to bind for more professional workers, such as lower paid staff at nursing facilities. We add to the small prior literature on the effects of minimum wages on nursing facility staffing using novel establishment-level data on daily hours worked; these data allow us to examine changes in staffing hours along margins previously unexplored in the minimum wage literature. We find no evidence that minimum wage increases reduced hours worked among lower-paid nurses in nursing facilities. In contrast, we find that increases in state and local minimum wages increased hours worked per resident day by nursing assistants; increases occurred for the average of all days throughout the month and on weekend days. We also find that a higher minimum wage increased the share of days in the month that facilities meet at least 75% of the minimum recommended levels of staffing for nursing assistants. These results lessen concerns that minimum wage hikes may reduce the quality of resident care at nursing facilities.

Keywords: Minimum wage; Nursing; Hours; Employment; Nursing facility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J44 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12122-022-09338-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jlabre:v:43:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s12122-022-09338-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12122

DOI: 10.1007/s12122-022-09338-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Labor Research is currently edited by Ozkan Eren

More articles in Journal of Labor Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().