Some argue that increasing the minimum wage will increase the number of job seekers and, consequently, employment. From a new NBER paper:
Do minimum wage increases affect search effort by job seekers?
…We investigate the effect of minimum wage increases on job search effort utilizing data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). We exploit the staggered nature of CPS and ATUS interviews and use an event-study approach, leveraging within-state variation in the adoption of minimum wage changes. We account for shocks affecting a particular state in a given year as well as month effects to control for seasonality, and individual demographic characteristics. Intuitively, we compare the outcomes in each month near the treatment date to the outcomes for otherwise-identical individuals in the same state and year whose survey period was not near a treatment date.
We find no evidence that the minimum wage has persistent effects on search effort; the likelihood of searching does not increase in the aftermath of minimum wage increases. However, there is a large yet transitory increase in the intensive margin of search effort, concentrated in the month of the minimum wage increase, that fades almost immediately. There is no short-run increase in the employment rate nor changes in observable characteristics of searchers, suggesting that our results are not driven by changes in the composition of job seekers. These findings are robust to the inclusion of demographic controls, the duration of unemployment benefits, and month-by-year fixed effects that account for any idiosyncratic national-level variation in a given month. We also conduct a permutation test for our search duration results in which we randomly assign minimum wage increases across time periods and show that these results do not appear to be due to chance.
Our results call into question the assumption underpinning search-and-matching models as applied to analysis of the minimum wage – namely, that more workers will enter the labor market and each worker will search harder, increasing the returns to firm vacancy postings. Importantly, we find minimum wage increases do not induce individuals to begin searching. While we find that minimum wage increases yield significant increases in worker search effort on the intensive margin, they are transitory (pg. 2-3).