There has been widespread discussion of an increase in the minimum wage, sparked by President Obama’s State of the Union address proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 and index it for inflation. It raises the question of whether the hiring of low-wage workers will be impeded. New research by Meer and West (2013) suggests that a negative impact of the minimum wage can be isolated by focusing on employment dynamics. Specifically, they find that a 10 percent increase in the real minimum wage is associated with a 0.53 percentage point decrease in the net job growth rate. This paper uses these recent research results to look at the employment implications of the California minimum wage increase. Our analysis finds that for California, this wage increase means a loss of 191,000 jobs. If every state followed suit, over 2.3 million new jobs would be lost across the country.
Continue Reading.....
No comments:
Post a Comment