Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties

Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester and Michael Reich

Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series from Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley

Abstract: We use policy discontinuities at state borders to identify the effects of minimum wages on earnings and employment in restaurants and other low-wage sectors. Our approach generalizes the case study method by considering all local differences in minimum wage policies between 1990 and 2006. We compare all contiguous county pairs in the U.S. that straddle a state border and find no adverse employment effects. We show that traditional approaches that do not account for local economic conditions tend to produce spurious negative effects due to spatial heterogeneities in employment trends that are unrelated to minimum wage policies. Our findings are robust to allowing for long term effects of minimum wage changes.

Keywords: Minimum Wage; Wage Policies; Social and Behavioral Sciences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (751)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/86w5m90m.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

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:cdl:indrel:qt86w5m90m

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series from Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().