IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp12000.html

Where Does the Minimum Wage Bite Hardest in California?

Author

Listed:
  • Even, William E.

    (Miami University)

  • Macpherson, David A.

    (Trinity University)

Abstract

This study uses employment data on California county-industry pairs (CIPs) between 1990 and 2016 to test whether minimum wage increases caused employment growth to slow most in the CIPS with a large share of low wage workers. Evidence supports the hypothesis, and we use the estimates to simulate the effect of a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage. The simulations suggest that a 10 percent increase could cause a 3.4 percent employment loss in the average CIP in California. The job loss is projected to be concentrated in two industries: accommodation and food services, and retail. While the most populated counties of California are expected to incur the largest employment loss in terms of the number of workers, the smaller counties generally experience a larger percentage point loss in employment due to the lower wages and the greater number of workers that would be affected by the minimum wage hike. Moreover, there is substantial variation across counties in terms of the percentage of jobs lost within a given industry.

Suggested Citation

  • Even, William E. & Macpherson, David A., 2018. "Where Does the Minimum Wage Bite Hardest in California?," IZA Discussion Papers 12000, IZA Network @ LISER.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12000
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp12000.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Balázs Égert & Jarmila Botev & Dave Turner & Balazs Egert, 2024. "Minimum Wages at a Turning Point?," CESifo Working Paper Series 11586, CESifo.
    3. Winters, John V., 2022. "Minimum Wages and Restaurant Employment for Teens and Adults in Metropolitan and Non-metropolitan Areas," IZA Discussion Papers 15499, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Acquah-Sarpong, Richard, 2025. "The impact of regionally tiered minimum wage on firms' credit default," 2025 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2025, Denver, CO 361113, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    5. Loukas Karabarbounis & Jeremy Lise & Anusha Nath, 2022. "Minimum Wages and Labor Markets in the Twin Cities," NBER Working Papers 30239, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Jonathan E. Leightner & Eric Jenkins, 2024. "Inflation’s Reduction of the Real Minimum Wage and Unemployment in the USA: 1987 to 2021," Journal of Economic Analysis, Anser Press, vol. 3(3), pages 126-137, September.
    7. David Neumark & Peter Shirley, 2022. "Myth or measurement: What does the new minimum wage research say about minimum wages and job loss in the United States?," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(4), pages 384-417, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General
    • J38 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Public Policy

    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:iza:izadps:dp12000. 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: Mark Fallak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaalu.html .

    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.