Research

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  Paid Sick Leave in Seattle: Examining the Impact on the Service Industry

  August 2013

  The study, based on surveys of Seattle’s service industry employers affected by the law, finds that some businesses in the city have taken measures to adapt to the costs of the new paid leave law, which took effect just under a year ago. That includes raising prices, reducing staff opportunities, and scaling back on employee benefits. The study is based on a survey of 301 service-industry [...]
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  Paid Sick Leave in Connecticut: A Pilot Study of Businesses’ Responses to the Law

  February 2013 • Michael Saltsman

  "Everybody benefits." That’s what proponents of Connecticut’s first-in-the-nation state paid sick leave law told legislators and the public during the debate that preceded the law’s passage. Business owners weren’t so sure—public hearings on the legislation contained testimony from a number of businesses concerned about the effects of the law on their operations. The state’s sick leave law took effect at the beginning of 2012, and the [...]
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  Minimum Wages: Evaluating New Evidence on Employment Effects

  January 2013 • David Neumark, Ian Salas

  The fierce political debate over raising the minimum wage, which is repeated yearly in legislatures across the country, has at times been matched by a strong academic debate on the subject. Specifically, economists have argued over whether a higher minimum wage reduces the employment of less-skilled jobseekers. The published research on the subject points overwhelmingly in one direction: A summary of the last two decades of [...]
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  The Labor Market Effects of Citywide Compensation Floors: Evidence from San Francisco and other “Superstar” Cities

  October 2012 • Aaron Yelowitz

  San Francisco is known as the City by the Bay, but for progressive advocates of wage and benefit mandates, it’s a city on a hill. San Francisco has the highest compensation floor in the country, with (in 2012) a $10.24 minimum wage, a mandatory health care expenditure of as much as $2.20 an hour, and one hour of mandatory paid sick time for every 30 [...]
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  The Impact of a $9.80 Federal Minimum Wage

  July 2012

  Congress is considering a series of proposals to raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The “Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2012,” to be introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), which would raise the federal minimum wage by 35 percent to $9.80 and index it for inflation; The “Rebuild America Act,” introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), which would raise the federal [...]
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  Can Raising the Minimum Wage Reduce Poverty and Hardship?

  April 2012 • Dr. Joseph Sabia, Robert Nielsen

  In 2011, the Census Bureau reported that the country’s poverty rate was 15.1 percent—the highest rate in nearly 20 years. One policy prescription for this problem is an increase in the federal minimum wage. It’s an intuitive thought: Raise the wages of the lowest paid workers, and poverty rates are sure to fall. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence hasn’t borne this out. Instead, multiple studies have demonstrated [...]