IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ete/ecoomp/637468.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is politics the missing piece of the minimum wage puzzle?

Author

Listed:
  • Jesse Wursten

Abstract

The effect of minimum wages on employment in the US is highly disputed. We show that the differences in the literature can be explained by heterogeneous shifts in political ideology across states. We add a control for political ideology to US county-level panel studies based on 1990-2013 employment and earnings data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). The results suggest minimum wages increase earnings in affected sectors without reducing employment. Unlike existing estimates, these new results remain consistent across specifications, even when we instrument the political ideology variable using evolving cultural values or campaign contributions. The methodology used can be extended to analyses of other state level policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Jesse Wursten, 2019. "Is politics the missing piece of the minimum wage puzzle?," Working Papers of ECOOM - Centre for Research and Development Monitoring 637468, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), ECOOM - Centre for Research and Development Monitoring.
    • Handle: RePEc:ete:ecoomp:637468
    Note: paper number MSI_1905
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/539141
    File Function: Published version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    minimum wage; labour policy; political ideology; employment; labour markets;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ete:ecoomp:637468. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: library EBIB (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://feb.kuleuven.be/centers/ecoom .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.