So, how much is minimum wage labor worth?

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The Federal Minimum wage has been $7.25 since July 24, 2009… that’s nearly 13 years!!

How much has changed since then? How much had it changed before?

What determines Federal minimum wage? Who does it apply to?

States have the power to write their own Minimum wage law, but the rates must be at least that of the Federal rate… or so I thought

State legislation falls into one of four categories– higher than the Federal, lower than the Federal, or the same as the Federal (some of these states have no State minimum wage law, others do have State law, but it states that Federal law applies)

How can a state have a lower wage than the Federal minimum? What’s the process for updating minimum wage like?

    - Georgia
    - States that are w the CPI-U

How do States write their minimum wage law? Whats the breakdown, spatially?

• Representing New England per usual, Massachusetts has historically higher minimum wage rates than the federal minimum wage. Yet, Pennsylvania sits not too far away at the same rate as the federal.
• Clustered to the south east, Florida set’s their minimum higher than the federal, while Alabama writes none of their own legislation and therefore accepts the federal minimum. Rounding our the trio, Georgia’s rates are actually lower than the federal minimum, one of two states in this category in 2020.
• Moving west, Texas has historically low wages to match its historically low house prices, but their neighbor Arkansas is hanging high
• Among the lows in the North, namely, Wisconsin, Minnesota’s minimum is a bit higher than the federal, but not by much.
• Finally, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming form a cluster out West with Colorado’s rates high, Utah’s rates the same, and Wyoming’s rates lower than the federal.

Research Question

Specifically, after looking at the wages of Texas over time in comparison, we wonder what defines the lag where the state minimum wage falls below the federal minimum wage. Are there rules defining when legislation can be updated? What obligation do the states have to update their minimum wage laws? Is this obligation defined by relative dates (relative to federal policy) or concrete dates (i.e. 5 years after federal updates, states must update). It also made us wonder how it is that Texas spent so long paying it’s workers less than the federal minumum wage. Why is Texas’ minimum wages so much lower than Massachusetts, and especially federal minimum wages? What is the process for creating and updating minumum wage legislation?

Background Theory

html_pretty currently supports three page themes (cayman, tactile and architect), and two syntax highlight styles (github and vignette). The theme and highlight styles can be specified in the document metadata, for example:

output:
  prettydoc::html_pretty:
    theme: architect
    highlight: github

Description of the Data

Feel free to use the knitr infrastructure with dozens of tunable options in your document.

set.seed(123)
n <- 1000
x1  <- matrix(rnorm(n), ncol = 2)
x2  <- matrix(rnorm(n, mean = 3, sd = 1.5), ncol = 2)
x   <- rbind(x1, x2)
head(x)

##             [,1]        [,2]
## [1,] -0.56047565 -0.60189285
## [2,] -0.23017749 -0.99369859
## [3,]  1.55870831  1.02678506
## [4,]  0.07050839  0.75106130
## [5,]  0.12928774 -1.50916654
## [6,]  1.71506499 -0.09514745

smoothScatter(x, xlab = "x1", ylab = "x2")

You can include code snippets of languages other than R, but note that the block header has no curly brackets around the language name.

// [[Rcpp::export]]
NumericVector timesTwo(NumericVector x) {
    return x * 2;
}

You can also write math expressions, e.g. \(Y = X\beta + \epsilon\), footnotes¹, and tables, e.g. using knitr::kable().

Sepal.Length	Sepal.Width	Petal.Length	Petal.Width	Species
5.1	3.5	1.4	0.2	setosa
4.9	3.0	1.4	0.2	setosa
4.7	3.2	1.3	0.2	setosa
4.6	3.1	1.5	0.2	setosa
5.0	3.6	1.4	0.2	setosa
5.4	3.9	1.7	0.4	setosa
4.6	3.4	1.4	0.3	setosa
5.0	3.4	1.5	0.2	setosa
4.4	2.9	1.4	0.2	setosa
4.9	3.1	1.5	0.1	setosa

Empirical Strategy or Methodological Approach

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Results

Takeaways and Conclusions

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1. A footnote here.↩︎