Minimum Wage and Disemployment: evidence from Las Cruces

This paper studies the employment effects of the first phase of the Las Cruces minimum wage ordinance, which raised the city-wide minimum wage in January 2015 from $7.50 per hour to $8.40 per hour. We employ a method of difference-in-difference to study employment in all sectors for the economy. This method would help us estimate total disemployment effects of the minimum-wage policy. We estimate that the minimum wage change had a modest disemployment effect which is consistent with the recent literature, we note that this is consistent with the modern theory of minimum wage.