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Full-Text Articles in Income Distribution

Child Care Costs In The Mountain West, 2025, Cason Noll, Isabelle G. Graham, Mohit Pande, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr. Feb 2026

Child Care Costs In The Mountain West, 2025, Cason Noll, Isabelle G. Graham, Mohit Pande, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet reports child care affordability and cost data for the five Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, “Child care costs in the United States,” highlights data on the differences in child care affordability across the United States. This fact sheet presents data on the percentage of annual income required to afford infant care for a minimum-wage worker, a typical child care worker, and a median family with children based on state-level income data for each Mountain West state. This fact sheet also reports annual costs, including college, …


Low Wage Workers In Mountain West States, 2024, Cason Noll, Krish Sharma, Maisoon Faris, Sydney Mitchell, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr. Apr 2025

Low Wage Workers In Mountain West States, 2024, Cason Noll, Krish Sharma, Maisoon Faris, Sydney Mitchell, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet presents 2024 data on low wage workers in the five Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The 2024 Oxfam America report, “The Crisis of Low Wages: Who earns less than $17 an hour in the U.S. in 2024?,” contains data on wage earners across all 50 states, the District of Columbia (D.C.), and Puerto Rico. This fact sheet focuses on the number and percentage of workers earning under $17 per hour in Mountain West states, as well as disparities in low-wage earnings by gender and race across the region.


Child Care Costs In The Mountain West, Saha Salahi, Kristian Thymianos, William E. Brown Jr., Caitlin J. Saladino Feb 2021

Child Care Costs In The Mountain West, Saha Salahi, Kristian Thymianos, William E. Brown Jr., Caitlin J. Saladino

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet examines the cost of child care using data from the Care Index, a collaboration between New America, Care.com, and other organizations. Data for the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are included in this document.


The Effects Of Increasing The Minimum Wage On Prices: Analyzing The Incidence Of Policy Design And Context, Daniel Macdonald, Eric Nilsson Jul 2016

The Effects Of Increasing The Minimum Wage On Prices: Analyzing The Incidence Of Policy Design And Context, Daniel Macdonald, Eric Nilsson

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We analyze the price pass-through effect of the minimum wage and use the results to provide insight into the competitive structure of low-wage labor markets. Using monthly price series, we find that the pass-through effect is entirely concentrated on the month that the minimum wage change goes into effect, and is much smaller than what the canonical literature has found. We then discuss why our results differ from that literature, noting the impact of series interpolation in generating most of the previous results. We then use the variation in the size of the minimum wage change to evaluate the competitive …


Estimating The Effects Of The Minimum Wage In A Developing Country: A Density Discontinuity Design Approach, Hugo Jales Oct 2015

Estimating The Effects Of The Minimum Wage In A Developing Country: A Density Discontinuity Design Approach, Hugo Jales

Center for Policy Research

This paper proposes a new framework to identify the effects of the minimum wage on the joint distribution of sector and wages in a developing country. I show that under reasonable assumptions, cross-sectional data on the worker's wage and sector can identify the joint distribution of the latent counterparts of these variables; that is, the sector status and wage that would prevail in the absence of the minimum wage. I apply the method in the “PNAD”, a nationwide representative Brazilian cross-sectional dataset for the years 2001 to 2009. The results indicate that the size of the informal sector is increased …


Effects Of The Minimum Wage On Employment Dynamics, Jonathan Meer, Jeremy West Sep 2015

Effects Of The Minimum Wage On Employment Dynamics, Jonathan Meer, Jeremy West

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct simulations showing that commonly-used specifications in this literature, especially those that include state-specific time trends, will not accurately capture these effects. Using three separate state panels of administrative employment data, we find that the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years. These effects are most pronounced for younger workers and in …


Who Benefits From A Minimum Wage Increase?, John W. Lopresti, Kevin J. Mumford Apr 2015

Who Benefits From A Minimum Wage Increase?, John W. Lopresti, Kevin J. Mumford

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper addresses the question of how a minimum wage increase affects the wages of low-wage workers. Most studies assume that there is a simple mechanical increase in the wage for workers earning a wage between the old and the new minimum wage, with some studies allowing for spillovers to workers with wages just above this range. Rather than assume that the wages of these workers would have remained constant, this paper estimates how a minimum wage increase impacts a low-wage worker’s wage relative to the wage the worker would have if there had been no minimum wage increase. The …


The New Minimum Wage Research, Dale Belman, Paul J. Wolfson Apr 2014

The New Minimum Wage Research, Dale Belman, Paul J. Wolfson

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.


What Does The Minimum Wage Do?, Dale Belman, Paul J. Wolfson Jan 2014

What Does The Minimum Wage Do?, Dale Belman, Paul J. Wolfson

Upjohn Press

This book attempts to make sense of the research on the minimum wage that began in the early 1990s. The authors look at who is affected by the minimum wage, both directly and indirectly; which observable, measurable variables (e.g., wages, employment, school enrollment) the minimum wage influences; how long it takes for the variables to respond to the minimum wage and the size and desirability of the effect; why the minimum wage has the results it does (and not others); and the workers most likely to be affected by changes to the minimum wage.


The Effect Of Minimum Wages On The Employment And Earnings Of South Africa's Domestic Service Workers, Tom Hertz Aug 2005

The Effect Of Minimum Wages On The Employment And Earnings Of South Africa's Domestic Service Workers, Tom Hertz

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Minimum wages have been in place for South Africa's one million domestic service workers since November of 2002. Using data from seven waves of the Labour Force Survey, this paper documents that the real wages, average monthly earnings, and total earnings of all employed domestic workers have risen since the regulations came into effect, while hours of work per week and employment have fallen. Each of these outcomes can be linked econometrically to the arrival of the minimum wage regulations. The overall estimated elasticities suggest that the regulations should have reduced poverty somewhat for domestic workers, although this last conclusion …


Living Wages And Local Governments, Timothy J. Bartik Apr 2002

Living Wages And Local Governments, Timothy J. Bartik

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.


Thinking About Local Living Wage Requirements, Timothy J. Bartik Mar 2002

Thinking About Local Living Wage Requirements, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper reviews what we currently know about the benefits and costs of different varieties of a "living wage": a local government requirement, now adopted by over 50 local governments, for wages above the federal minimum imposed on employers with some financial link to the local government. The review includes economic theory, empirical research on local labor markets, and empirical research on the living wage. The paper concludes that moderate living wage requirements applied to the local government's own employees, and contractors' and grantees' employees who are funded by the local government, may do more good than harm. Excessive living …