With Massachusetts legislators considering increasing the Commonwealth’s minimum wage, the economics is emerging as a point of contention. Professor Arindrajit Dube is the lead author of a study published by Harvard’s Review of Economics and Statistics regarding the effect of minimum wage increases on employment, which finds that workers would not be fired if the minimum wage rose.
Minimum wage debate rages in Mass. – Worcester Telegram & Gazette
6/13/13
Yet such a review would also have to include research finding no evidence that increases in minimum wage lead to job losses. Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the lead author of a study published in 2010 by Harvard’s ”Review of Economics and Statistics” that found no evidence that minimum wage increases between 1990 and 2006 caused job losses among teens or restaurant and retail workers.
Dube said that unlike Neumark’s research, his analysis took into account regional and state differences in unemployment, minimum wage requirements, and other factors to track restaurant and retail employment.
”It doesn’t reduce the number of jobs and workers stick around their jobs longer,” he said.
Dube said he supports minimum wage increases in Massachusetts because the gap between rich and poor has been widening for decades and because such increases can play a small but important role in raising wages at the bottom.