Work

Employment effects of minimum wage indexing: Establishment evidence from Oregon restaurants

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Though 18 states will index their minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index by 2025, few studies have examined indexing's differential employment effects. Leveraging a period of stability in minimum wages (2000–2007) and two distinct national geocoded databases of establishments, we explore how indexing affected employment in Oregon restaurants, one of the earliest indexing states (2003). Nearest‐neighbor matching is used as a preprocessing step before regression, pairing individual restaurants in Oregon to restaurants with similar characteristics in states where the minimum wage was unchanged. We find evidence that establishment employment falls 3.6% after indexing, implying an employment elasticity of −0.18.

Source: Economic Inquiry

DOI: 10.1111/ecin.13284

Authors: Stephen Miller, Gary A. Wagner, Alicia Plemmons

Institutions: Franciscan University of Steubenville, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, West Virginia University

Language: English

Topic: Labor market dynamics and wage inequality

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Decent work and economic growth, No poverty

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W4408764918

FWCI: 3.81

Cites: 44

Cited by: 4

Related to: 10