OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Do minimum wage increases mobilize low-income people? We measure the effect of minimum wage increases on voting behavior in two ways. First, we merge public records of New York City municipal employee wages to voting records to observe voting by people affected and unaffected by the minimum wage across multiple elections. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that recent increases in New York’s minimum wage increased voter turnout among low-income workers by several percentage points. Second, we incorporate county-level panel data from 1980-2016 and find that an eight percent increase in the minimum wage (the median increase in our dataset) is associated with a one-third of one percentage point increase in aggregate voter turnout. These results imply that economic policy can have democratic implications, with minimum wage increases also serving to increase turnout among low-wage workers and make the electorate more representative.
