Has there ever been a better time to study the minimum wage? The federal minimum has not changed since 2009—a flat landscape upon which state and local governments have layered dozens of policy experiments. In the past nine years, 28 states and 48 localities have changed their minimum wage laws, in some cases more than doubling the federal level of $7.25 per hour. A $15 minimum is now part of a national debate, with the reported support of two-thirds of Americans.
“After being told in graduate school that we know everything there is to know about this topic and we should not waste our time, the flow of papers is tremendous,” said economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine. Neumark joined more than a dozen top minimum wage scholars in Minneapolis for a spirited two-day review of the latest evidence, theory, and statistical methods on the subject.
The rush of minimum wage innovation and data overlaps with two years of high inflation and the Fed’s fastest monetary tightening in 40 years. Better understanding of the minimum wage “affects directly monetary policy discussions and deliberations,” said Minneapolis Fed Research Director Andrea Raffo, opening the conference. Yet “the evidence points in different directions.”
Fittingly, each conference day began with a just-released paper measuring the outcomes from large, ongoing minimum wage hikes—one focused on Minneapolis and St. Paul, the other on New York and California. Both studies employ a similar,...
Hyderabad: BRS leader Aedla Sudhakar Reddy strongly criticised the statements of HYDRAA commissioner A.V. Ranganath regarding the status of Bathukammakunta. The official had claimed that the place...