Federal Reserve Says State Minimum Wage Hikes Have Cost Up to 200,000 Jobs

Minimum wage hikes at the state level have reduced the number of jobs by as many as 200,000, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The Federal Reserve study was conducted by David Neumark, director for the Center for Economics & Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Since the last federal wage increase in 2007 to $7.25 per hour, 23 states have raised their wages higher than the federal level. By 2014, the average wage in those nearly two-dozen states was 11.5 percent higher than the federal wage.

“Thus, allowing for the possibility of larger job loss effects, based on other studies, and possible job losses among older low-skilled adults, a reasonable estimate based on the evidence is that current minimum wages have directly reduced the number of jobs nationally by about 100,000 to 200,000, relative to the period just before the Great Recession,” the study says.

(via Washington Examiner)