Does increasing minimum wages positively impact health outcomes? A new working paper by UCI Distinguished Professor of economics David Neumark takes a deep dive into the large and growing body of evidence on minimum wage effects on health and health-related behaviors. Despite assertions from major medical associations – the American Public Health Association and American Medical Association – that higher minimum wages overall improve public health, Neumark finds the answer to be a bit more nuanced.

“This is a new area of research, extending the analysis of minimum wage effects from labor market outcomes to a host of other outcomes. While it provides some interesting results, there is at this point ambiguous evidence, with studies pointing to both beneficial as well as adverse effects on health,” says Neumark who also codirects UCI’s Center for Population, Inequality and Policy.

Widely recognized as an expert on effects of minimum wages on employment, wages, earnings and incomes, Neumark turned his attention to the policy’s impact on health because studies finding benefits were getting a great deal of attention, but the larger body of literature often failed to find beneficial effects – or worse, he says. He conducted a review of 63 recent studies in this burgeoning field to determine conclusions that can be drawn between changes in minimum wage and health outcomes, and why conflicting evidence exists. He divided existing research into nine categories:

• Adult and teen health
• Infant and child health
• Diet and obesity
• Mental health
• Suicide
• Family structure and children
• Risky behavior
• Crime
• Mechanisms that can affect health

Overall, he found evidence to be clearly mixed, spanning beneficial ties between minimum wage and health to adverse outcomes. In his review of studies focused on adult and teen health, he found more convincing evidence of both mixed and adverse effects than singularly positive outcomes. For infant and child health, he found mixed but more positive health effects of increases in minimum wages, yet adverse effects in developing countries. The findings on diet and obesity leaned beneficial to null, but not negative. The evidence for mental health is mixed between studies finding no impact and studies finding a positive impact. “And, perhaps surprisingly, the evidence for suicide points clearly to beneficial effects of higher minimum wages,” he says.

On the other hand, studies on family structure and children point in different directions, with evidence that an increase in minimum wages leads mothers to spend more time with children, but also a decline in children’s test scores, he says.

The evidence generally points to minimum wages increasing risky behavior – like drinking and smoking, while the effects of minimum wages on crime, he says, are “mixed and all over the map with convincing findings on both ends, so it’s difficult to draw a conclusion one way or the other.”

As for indirect mechanisms, Neumark notes that the best evidence he found suggests that “higher minimum wages reduce employer-provided health insurance and perhaps insurance overall, although Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have mitigated this influence, and there is not clear evidence of greater unmet medical needs.”

Taken together, findings indicate that policymakers considering minimum wage increases should view skeptically blanket statements about minimum wage being an effective way to improve public health, he says.

“Studies of minimum wage effects on various dimensions of health are actually mixed and sometimes include adverse effects. These should not be discounted and clearly more research needs to be done,” he says.

To learn more about this work, check out Neumark’s recent Vox EU column, “Higher minimum wages and mixed effects on health.” Review his working paper in full via NBER online.

-Heather Ashbach, UCI Social Sciences