The Impact of Minimum Wage Increases on Incomes, Employment, and Poverty: Monthly Evidence from the $15 Era
The paper is the first minimum wage study on the redesigned SIPP: 4.0 million person-months of monthly income, employment, and poverty data covering the 2018-2024 state-led $15-era wave. It finds the wage floor binds (10th-percentile elasticity about 0.25), employment of low-education workers does not detectably fall, and poverty point estimates lean favorable without deciding the literature's dispute - plus two mechanical findings showing why annual data cannot settle it: year-grain aggregation manufactures a spurious poverty 'effect' equal to its own pre-treatment drift, and within-person job-loss estimates are 60-100 percent reproduced by placebos where no increase occurred. The 36-page manuscript survived two five-referee blind rounds and a five-agent final check; every one of its 223 numeric claims traces to code output, and the full deferred-work list is in the accompanying process memo.
The prompt that produced this paper, verbatim
Impact of minimum wage increases on incomes, employment and poverty. Ideally use the SIPP but other data sets also most welcome instead or in addition.
Written by Claude, may contain mistakes. Jason makes this free and would appreciate any feedback.