Social Equity and the Methodology of Assessing the Impacts of Minimum Wage Increases: Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Effects in Minneapolis

Myers, Samuel L; Myers, Samuel L

Panel Paper: Social Equity and the Methodology of Assessing the Impacts of Minimum Wage Increases: Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Effects in Minneapolis

Friday, November 4, 2016 : 10:35 AM

Piscataway (Washington Hilton)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Samuel L Myers¹, David Cooper², Man Xu¹, Thomas Durfee¹, William Spriggs³, Lawrence Mishel², William McKinley Rodgers⁴, Juliett SantaMaria¹, Yufeng Lai¹ and Monica Garcia Perez⁵, (1)University of Minnesota, (2)Economic Policy Institute, (3)AFL-CIO, (4)Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, (5)St. Cloud State University

This paper examines the racial, ethnic and gender distribution of the impacts of proposed increases in the minimum wage in the City of Minneapolis and surrounding counties. One of the core questions posed is how one infers the distributional impacts by race, gender and ethnicity from industry estimates. It is the lead paper on the panel: Social Equity and the Methodology of Assessing the Impacts of Minimum Wage Increases and considers the methodological issues associated with adjusting conventional estimates of the impacts of minimum wage increases to account for differential effects on racial and ethnic minority group members.