The Employment Effects of Minimum Wages: Some Questions We Need to Answer

Abstract

The literature on the employment effects of minimum wages is about a century old, and includes hundreds of studies. Yet the debate among researchers about the employment effects of minimum wages remains intense and unsettled. Questions have arisen in the past research that, if answered, may prove most useful in making sense of the conflicting evidence. However, additional questions should be considered to better inform the policy debate, in particular in the context of the very high minimum wages coming on line in the United States, about which past research is quite uninformative.

People versus machines: The impact of minimum wages on automatable jobs

“…2 See for example Neumark and Wascher (1996); Neumark (2001); Singell and Terborg (2007); Neumark and Wascher (2007); Thompson (2009); Sabia, Burkhauser, and Hansen (2012); Wascher (2014a, 2014b); Clemens and Wither (2016); Meer and West (2016); and Powell (2016). Neumark (2017) reviews the very recent literature, classifying the kinds of studies that find disemployment effects and the kinds that do not.…”

Minimum Wages and Retirement

“… 2 For extensive reviews of the literature, see Brown, Gilroy, and Kohen (1982), Card and Krueger (1995), and Neumark and Wascher (2007). Neumark (2017) discussed recent papers that found negative effects of the minimum wage; published examples included Thompson (2009) and Meer and West (2016). …”

Heterogeneous effects of minimum wage on labor market outcomes: A case study from Turkey

“…A controversy about methodology also exists, and these different findings may be partly due to the use of different empirical approaches. As the drawbacks of the use of time series are well established (Card and Krueger, 1995), there is an ongoing debate about the use of panel data of case-study approaches and of alternative approaches such as the "bunching" estimator (Dube et al, 2010;Allegretto et al, 2011;Allegretto et al, 2017;Neumark et al, 2014;Neumark and Wascher, 2017;Neumark, 2017;Cengiz et al, 2019).…”