A higher wage will lift hardworking Americans out of poverty and break their link with government assistance.

Dube discusses the minimum wage as a policy mechanism.

Much of the new minimum wage research is flawed. The authors conclude that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind.

The authors find that a rise in minimum wage has an instantaneous impact on wage rates and a corresponding negative impact on employment.

Minimum wage increases—in the range that have been implemented in the United States—do not reduce employment among <a name="teens" id="teens"></a>teens.

The authors studied a rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage and found no indication that it reduced employment.

The economics of the minimum wage are complicated, and it’s far from obvious what an increase would accomplish. A more generous earned-income tax credit would provide more support for the working poor and would be <a name="pro-business" id="pro-business"></a>pro-business at the same time.

The results of this simulation suggest that the EITC leads to an increase in the share of less-educated women that will be eligible for Social Security retirement benefits and leads to an increase in their monthly benefit amount.

Tax credits are worthwhile in their own right, but they are not plausible substitutes for an increase in the minimum wage.

Response to a request by Senator Grassley about the effects of increasing the federal minimum wage versus expanding the earned income tax credit.