Documentation
The own-wage elasticity (OWE) of employment measures the proportional change in a group’s employment caused by a minimum wage increase, divided by the proportional change in that group’s average wage.
The Minimum Wage Own-Wage Elasticity Repository contains a representative estimate of the OWE of employment from every minimum wage study published since 1992, with the following restrictions:
the study must evaluate the employment effects of changes in the statutory minimum wage
the study must estimate a statistically significant, positive wage effect of the minimum wage, in addition to estimating the employment effect, for the same group of workers using a similar research design
the study must be published after 1992 and include “quasi-experimental” or “experimental” variations
studies older than 10 years must have been published in an academic journal
the study must focus on the United States, United Kingdom, countries in the European Union, or Canada (we will eventually relax this restriction)
The current version of the repository, Version 1.1.0, contains 90 studies, 74 of which are published in peer-reviewed journals. A description of Version 1.0 of the repository is in the paper
Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer. 2024. “Own-Wage Elasticity: Quantifying the Impact of Minimum Wages on Employment”. Working Paper. NBER Working Paper 32925.
For more information, explore a table of all the studies or download the underlying data. Please don’t hesitate to submit any corrections or studies we have accidentally omitted.
If you use the data or this site in your own work, please reference or cite it:
Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer. 2024. Minimum wage own-wage elasticity repository, Version 1.1.0. https://economic.github.io/owe