The Effects of Recent Minimum Wage Increases on the Wage Distribution in the State of Arizona

Minimum wage legislation has always been a controversial topic within the fields of politics and economics. There are those who support it under the belief that those affected will be better off, seeing increased wages, greater efficiency, and overall economic prosperity, whereas its opponents argue against it under the belief that it could lead to negative effects such as decreased employment, higher prices, and loss of productivity. This is something that has recently come up in Arizona after the enactment of Proposition 206 (Prop.206), a law which is set to raise the state minimum wage from $8.05 in 2016 to $12.00 by 2020. In this paper, rather than taking a political stance, however, we seek to find answers about the real effects that this minimum wage law has had on wage earners through the manner in which it has affected the state’s wage distribution, meaning the percentage of earners making a certain hourly rate, or between a certain wage range (i.e. $10.00 to $10.50). We begin this search by looking at May Wage Estimates offered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). From that data, we created wage distributions for the state of Arizona for the years 2011-2018. These showed us what percentage of workers in the state are making a certain hourly rate based on the total number of employees in Arizona. By summarizing this through tables and histograms, we can also visually see the way in which AZ wage distributions have changed over time. However, we also sought to visually compare the AZ wage distributions with that of nearby states, so we also used wage distribution data from Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. Finally, we also wanted to quantify the fixed effects of enacting the legislation in the state of AZ. To do so we ran a difference-in-differences analysis that gave us an actual value measuring how recent minimum wage increases have affected the percentage of total wage earning less than $11.40 per hour. We discovered that our results, although not extremely significant (due to available data), do strongly indicate that the recent minimum wage legislation in AZ has increased the percentage of workers earning more than that amount per hour. Following that, we also give recommendations that could improve the results found in this report.