I'm currently reading some recent papers on the minimum wage. Two of them are on Seattle's recent minimum wage increase: "Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence From Seattle" and "Minimum Wage Increases and Individual Employment Trajectories." I've already read those and am trying to organize my thoughts on them. The other is "Effect of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics" by Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West. I'll try to write a post or two on what I've learned.
I started reading these papers because my home state of Illinois recently and ill-advisedly passed a minimum wage bill, which will increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025. I think this is a foolish decision. What I'm discovering is that I can't trust any of the commentary on this literature without reading the actual papers. Various news reports contradict each other, or they contradict the paper itself by flagrantly misreporting the conclusions or declining to report on the various caveats. I will try to include some examples of this behavior in a future post.
Don't trust anything I say, either. Read the papers themselves. I'll do my honest best to summarize, but there's no substitute for sitting down, reading the paper, scratching your noggin, and figuring out what it says.
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