22/8/2014: Minimum Wage and Employment: Recent Study
The effects of minimum wage laws on employment levels and employment prospects for various categories of workers are subject of voluminous literature in economics. Still, little consensus exists on whether higher minimum wages impede new jobs creation or destroy existent jobs or suppress earnings growth for lower wage employees. A recent paper by Meer, Jonathan and West, Jeremy, titled " Effects of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics " (June 26, 2012, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2094726 ) offers estimates "how the minimum wage affects both employment levels and dynamics... To do so, we employ the Business Dynamics Statistics, a long (1977-2009) panel of administrative data on the aggregate population of non-agriculture private-sector employers in the United States, broken out based on establishment location. These data offer the ability to examine gross job creation and destruction separately, an important advantage." The authors first discuss " why even a car...