Excerpted from Section 2 of my paper: Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes. Key sections are in bold. Alterations (but not deletions) from the paper are marked in square brackets [ ].
In this [post], I review the key papers on the topic of minimum wages and [poverty] based on U.S. data, and discuss their findings and limitations. My primary goal here is to provide a quantitative summary of the existing evidence, focusing on the [official] poverty rate elasticity as the most commonly estimated distributional statistic. [A poverty rate elasticity with respect to the minimum wage of, say, -0.2 means that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces the poverty rate by 2 percent. Note that this is different from a 2 percentage point reduction in the poverty rate.]
I begin by describing the process of selecting studies for this review. First, I…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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