TY  - JOUR
AU  - Card,David
AU  - Katz,Lawrence F.
AU  - Krueger,Alan B.
TI  - An Evaluation of Recent Evidence on the Employment Effects of Minimum   and Subminimum Wages
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 4528
PY  - 1993
Y2  - November 1993
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4528
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4528.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Card
Department of Economics
549 Evans Hall, #3880
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-3880
Tel: 510/642-5222
Fax: 510/643-7042
E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu

Lawrence F. Katz
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/495-5148
Fax: 617/613-1245
E-Mail: lkatz@harvard.edu

Alan B. Krueger
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-4046
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: akrueger@princeton.edu
AB  - We re-examine recent cross-state evidence on the employment effect of the minimum wage.  A re-evaluation of the data used in Neumark and Wascher's (1992) study of the minimum wage provides no support for their conclusion that the minimum wage has an adverse effect on teenage employment.  Neumark and Wascher's findings are shown to be due to an inadvertent mistake in the definition of their school enrollment variable.  In addition, Neumark and Wascher's coverage-weighted relative minimum wage index is shown to be negatively correlated with average teenage wages.  We also re-analyze the experiences of individual states following the April 1990 increase in the Federal minimum wage, allowing for a full year lag in the effect of the law and controlling for changes in (properly measured) enrollment rates.  These changes actually strengthen Card's (1992a) conclusion that the 1990 increase in the Federal minimum had no adverse employment effect.  Lastly, we find that subminimum wages are rarely used, casting doubt on the claim that subminimum wage provisions temper any employment losses attributable to the minimum wage.
ER  -