Locally Controlled Minimum Wages Leapfrog Public Preferences

Simonovits, Gábor; Payson, Julia

doi:10.31219/osf.io/c6dfk

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, because we rely on multilevel modeling and post-stratification, our state-level estimates of public opinion will approximate true state-level preferences as long as inclusion to these samples is ignorable to our dependent variable-that is, minimum wage preferences-conditional on the demographic variables we include in our models. We also note that recent work (Simonovits and Payson, 2023;Wang et al, 2015) has used online samples and MRP to successfully approximate election results as well as minimum wage preferences in cities.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 90%

Stability and change in the opinion–policy relationship: Evidence from minimum wage laws

Simonovits,

Bor

2023

Research & Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent studies have documented large discrepancies between mass preferences and policies in U.S. states consistent with theories that highlight the oversized influence of affluent Americans on policymaking. In this note, we replicate and extend a recent such study (Simonovits, Guess, and Nagler, 2019) to assess how policy bias evolves in time. Specifically, relying on novel data and methods, we construct measures of minimum wage preferences and compare them to observed policies in each state for the years of 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2021. We demonstrate that, averaged across states, policy change closely tracked a pronounced increase in preferences for higher minimum wages, but the size of policy bias remained relatively stable. However, this national pattern hides an increasingly polarized policy landscape: in many states, insufficient responsiveness led to an increasing deviation between preferences and policies, while in other states policy changes—larger than preference changes—closed initial policy bias.

show abstract

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 90%

Stability and change in the opinion–policy relationship: Evidence from minimum wage laws

Simonovits,

Bor

2023

Research & Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Table 2 highlights considerable differences between the electorates in cities with and without minimum wages in terms of supporting major political parties. Recent survey evidence by Simonovits and Payson (2020) suggests that there is a strong correlation between city-level preferences and the prevailing minimum wage.…”

Section: Figure 1 Distribution Of Kaitz Index For Us Cities and Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

City Limits: What Do Local-Area Minimum Wages Do?

Dubé

Lindner

2021

Journal of Economic Perspectives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cities are increasingly setting their own minimum wages, and this trend has accelerated sharply in recent years. While in 2010 there were only three cities with their own minimum wages exceeding the state or federal standard, by 2020 there were 42. This new phenomenon raises the question: is it desirable to have city-level variation in minimum wage polices? We discuss the main trade-offs emerging from local variation in minimum wage polices and evaluate their empirical relevance. First, we document what type of cities raise minimum wages, and we discuss how these characteristics can potentially impact the effectiveness of city-level minimum wage policies. Second, we summarize the evolving evidence on city-level minimum wage changes and provide some new evidence of our own. Early evidence suggests that the impact of the policy on wages and employment to date has been broadly similar to the evidence on state- and federal-level minimum wage changes. Overall, city-level minimum wages seem to be able to tailor the policy to the local economic environment without imposing substantial distortions in allocation of labor and businesses across locations.

show abstract

“…Table 2 highlights considerable differences between the electorates in cities with and without minimum wages in terms of supporting major political parties. Recent survey evidence by Simonovits and Payson (2020) highlights that there is a strong correlation between city-level preferences and the prevailing minimum wage.…”

Section: Arguments Concerning City-level Minimum Wagesmentioning

confidence: 99%