Association of Federal and State Level Minimum Wage Legislations and Food Security

Examine whether federal and state-level minimum wage increases were associated with reductions in the fraction of households that report food security in the US.

We combined household-level food security and individual-level demographic data from the US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey Food Supplement for the years 1998 through 2019 (22 years, pre-COVID) with state-level minimum wage data from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. A pooled sample of 962,756 individual-year observations was used in a linear probability model. The outcome was a binary indicator for low food security or very low food security, and the primary independent variable was the state-level minimum wage (inflation adjusted to 2019 dollars). Covariates included age, sex, race/ethnicity, marital status, education, metropolitan population size, year fixed effects, and county fixed effects allowing control for time-invariant unobserved county confounders.

A one-dollar increase of the minimum wage was not associated with low food security prevalence but was associated with a statistically significant decrease of 0.16% (95%CI, -0.27 to -0.04%), corresponding to a 3.58 lower prevalence rate in very low food security. Models that allowed for potentially heterogeneous minimum wage policy effects across race/ethnicity or sex showed significantly larger effects only for the other race/ethnicity subgroup.

Minimum wage legislation may reduce very low food security prevalence rates, and it may also not significantly reduce existing disparity gaps in very low food security prevalence across race/ethnicity and sex.