Date of Award

12-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Ryan Gallagher, Ph.D.

Abstract

The economic impacts of minimum wage laws have been the subject of debate for over a century within the United States (US). This paper summarizes this and reviews the body of academic literature studying the effects of minimum wage laws, much of which center around their employment effects. This paper also examines how the ongoing debate can be attributed to factors that have not been as comprehensively reviewed, such as disagreements over politics, poverty, and impact on prices. The purpose of this paper is to achieve an understanding of the complexities surrounding the minimum wage and its overall implications. From this research, it is evident that various analyses of the minimum wage exist due to personal biases and interpretations of the data at hand, and therefore, a consensus is not possible.

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