The Effect of Recent Increases in the U.S. Minimum Wage: Results from Three Data Sources

This paper investigates the impact on earnings and employment of substantive increases in the minimum wage under the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. Against the backdrop of a thin contemporary literature offering mixed results, our study uses three different data sets, and three different estimation strategies for addressing geographically-disparate trends. Despite the concatenation of seemingly large wage increases and a soft labor market, our evidence is generally unsupportive of material disemployment effects among industrial and demographic groups typically associated with low-wage employment. Our results are consistent with minimum wage workers being concentrated in sectors of the economy for which the labor-demand response to wage increases is seemingly modest.