The Employment Effects of the Minimum Wage: A Selection Ratio Approach to Measuring Treatment Effects

David Slichter

2015 Papers from Job Market Papers

Abstract: This paper studies the employment effects of the minimum wage using a novel empirical strategy which can allow the researcher to identify treatment effects when more than one control group is available but each such control group is imperfect. Expanding on previous researchers who have compared regions which increase the minimum wage with nearby regions which do not change the minimum wage, I compare border counties in which the minimum wage increases to the set of neighboring counties, the set of neighbor-of-neighboring counties, etc. The key innovation is to model the ratio of the bias of these comparisons. The model I select uses the relative similarity of control groups to the treated group on observables as a guide to their relative similarity on unobservables. Crucially, models of this type have a testable implication when there are enough control groups. Using data from the United States, I find that recent minimum wage increases have produced modest or zero disemployment effects for teenagers.

JEL-codes: C21 C29 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ideas.repec.org/jmp/2015/psl76.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: The employment effects of the minimum wage: A selection ratio approach to measuring treatment effects (2023)
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:jmp:jm2015:psl76

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 Papers from Job Market Papers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Team ().