Effects of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics / Jonathan Meer, Jeremy West.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Meer, Jonathan.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

West, Jeremy.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w19262.

NBER working paper series no. w19262

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.

Summary:

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct simulations showing that commonly-used specifications in this literature, especially those that include state-specific time trends, will not accurately capture these effects. Using three separate state panels of administrative employment data, we find that the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years. These effects are most pronounced for younger workers and in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage workers.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2013.