The Effects of Minimum Wage Increases on Retail Employment and Hours: New Evidence from Monthly CPS Data

Abstract

Minimum wage, Employment, Retail trade,

Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor?

“…Much of the literature examining the employment effects of minimum wage increases has focused on low-skilled workers, usually teenagers and high school dropouts, or on workers in low-skilled industries because these populations are more likely to be affected by such increases. Neumark and Wascher (2007) review over 90 studies published since the iconoclastic Card andKrueger (1994, 1995) studies of the mid-1990s and conclude that there is overwhelming evidence that the least-skilled workers experience the strongest disemployment effects from minimum wage increases (see, for example, Neumark and Wascher 1992;Williams 1993;Deere, Murphy, and Welch 1995;Currie and Fallick 1996;Abowd et al 1999;Partridge and Partridge 1999;Burkhauser, Couch, and Wittenburg 2000a, b;Couch and Wittenburg 2001;Neumark 2001;Neumark andWascher 2002, 2004;Campolieti, Fang, and Gunderson 2005;Campolieti, Gunderson, and Riddell 2006;Sabia 2008Sabia , 2009a. Median employment elasticities range from 20.1 to 20.3, though a few studies have found employment elasticities that are larger (between 20.6 and 20.9) for less-educated single mothers (Sabia 2008) and younger high school dropouts (Burkhauser, Couch, and Wittenberg 2000b).…”

Do minimum wages raise employment? Evidence from the U.S. retail-trade sector

“…Our approach differs from that of Sabia (2008) in at least two important ways. First, we use more complete data on employment in retail trade by using countylevel counts of employment from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.…”

“…10 Since the information in this column pertains to the number of counties that meet the balanced panel restriction of having data available throughout the 64 quarters, the number of quarterly observations utilized for each sector is simply the number of counties multiplied by 64. 11 Sabia (2008) also considered the importance of state-level trends in his analysis, finding that accounting for these trends no longer provided evidence of a disemployment effect in the retail sector. Neumark and Wascher (2007) found that adding state-level trends tended to lead to insignificant minimum wage coefficients, although this seems partly due to the increase in standard errors caused by this inclusion.…”

“…1 Other specific low-wage sectors of the labor market have not received the same attention as the restaurant sector. One exception is the general retail sector, where a limited number of studies have investigated potential disemployment effects (Kim and Taylor, 1995;Partridge and Partridge, 1999;Sabia, 2008). Although the prevalence of minimum-wage workers in the general retail sector is considerably lower than in the case of restaurants, these studies have universally supported the notion that minimum wages lower employment.…”

Minimum wages and the economic well‐being of single mothers

“…9 Because the inclusion of year effects in Equation (1) will capture much of the variation in federal minimum wages, state minimum wage changes provide an important source of identifying variation. In particular, the post-1997 period provides a rich new source of identification because of the increase in both frequency and magnitude of state minimum wage hikes (Sabia, 2008a). Wittenburg (2000a, 2000b), Card and Krueger (1995), and Deere, Murphy, and Welch (1995), several state-and year-specific measures of economic health are included as controls.…”