TY - JOUR AU - Neumark,David AU - Wascher,William TI - Minimum Wages and Employment: A Review of Evidence from the New Minimum Wage Research JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12663 PY - 2006 Y2 - November 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Neumark Department of Economics University of California at Irvine 3151 Social Science Plaza Irvine, CA 92697 Tel: 949-824-8496 Fax: 949/824-2182 E-Mail: dneumark@uci.edu William Wascher Federal Reserve Board Stop 66 Washington, DC 20551 Tel: 202/452-2812 Fax: 202/452-5296 E-Mail: william.l.wascher@frb.gov AB - We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s. Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a lack of consensus about the overall effects on low-wage employment of an increase in the minimum wage. However, the oft-stated assertion that recent research fails to support the traditional view that the minimum wage reduces the employment of low-wage workers is clearly incorrect. A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups. ER -