A nice roundup. He concludes that the impact on teen employment is fairly small for the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in this country.
This is not a surprising conclusion, giving the fact that employers can re-bundle the remuneration packages is for all but the most menial of low paid workers to avoiding crib increasing their net compensation when there is a modest minimum wage increase.
The real question that should be asked of minimum wage advocates is do you seriously expect modest minimum wage increases to increase the net incomes of workers given the fact that employers can simply cut back on other areas ranging from training to increased work intensity
In January 2014, a funny thing seems to have happened. Parts (though not all) of the econoblogosphere forgot why time series econometrics fell out of favor in the early 1990s when it comes to analyzing minimum wage policies. Besides the fact that there is a lot more variation in minimum wages than just the federal (or average) minimum wage in the U.S., the timing of the minimum wage increases is very uneven. For example, U.S. minimum wage increases tend to occur more frequently during the late phases of the business cycle (see Figure 4).
Now this timing issue makes trouble even for state panel studies, but it really wreaks havoc on time series analysis. By not having a control group, time series evidence has to rely solely on changes in trends around the time of minimum wage increases, as this blog post by Kevin Erdmann most recently tries to…
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