BERKELEY ECONOMIC REVIEW
Assessing Whether People’s Locations Predict Attitudes Towards a US Federal Minimum Wage Increase Saleel Huprikar
University of Pennsylvania Abstract The United States federal minimum wage has not increased since 2009, and the debate regarding whether the federal minimum wage should increase continues to intensify. The field of literature on attitudes towards the federal minimum wage has typically examined the breakdown of such attitudes based only on a few variables such as political affiliation, gender, and race. Using Pew Research Center survey data from 2013-2016 and state-level economic data, this examination investigates whether a person’s general location (rural or urban) and the economic conditions of the state that the person resides in can have an influence on the person’s perspective towards a federal minimum wage increase, while controlling for the person’s political ideology, race, gender, income, education, and generation. This examination’s argument is two-fold: 1) People’s general locations and the associated state-level economic conditions can have an impact on their perspectives towards a federal minimum wage increase; 2) it is inconclusive whether the neoclassical argument on the minimum wage is losing support among the American public. This research uncovers substantial variation in individual-level minimum wage attitudes based on state-
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