Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries

By Michael Davies, R. Jisung Park, and Anna Stansbury. From NPR's Planet Money.

"These economists analyze data from California worker compensation claims between 2000 and 2019, and they look to see if there is any effect of increasing the minimum wage on workplace injuries. They find one. And a rather large one. "We find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage increases the injury rate by 11% in an occupation-metro area labor market which is fully exposed to the minimum wage increase." That's right, when the minimum wage goes up, so do workplace injuries. Yikes. But why? Davies, Park, and Stansbury find that these workplace injuries reflect "cumulative physical strain, suggesting that employers respond to minimum wage increases by intensifying the pace of work, which in turn increases injury risk." This paper's findings are pretty shocking, and we will be looking down the road to see if other economists can replicate them. Link to paper"