Minimum wages and the health of immigrants’ children

ABSTRACT

States are increasingly resorting to raising the minimum wage to boost the earnings of those at the bottom of the income distribution. In this article, we examine the effects of minimum wage increases on the health of immigrants’ children. Their parents are disproportionately represented in minimum wage jobs and are a growing part of the US labour force. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy and data from the National Health Interview Survey from 2000 to 2015, we examine whether children of low-educated immigrants experience any changes in their health when the minimum wage increases. We find no evidence that this is the case despite a number of robustness checks.

KEYWORDS:

• Minimum wage
• immigrant children
• health
• low education

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J15
• I1
• 2I13
• I14

Acknwoldgement

The authors thank Bradyn Churchill, Otto Lenhart, Vincent Pohl and Joseph Sabia and session participants at the 2019 meetings of the American Health Economics Society and the 2019 meetings of the Eastern Economic Association for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Data from the Migration Policy Institute.

² http://www.nccp.org/media/releases/release_1.html.

³ We focus on health outcomes and not access to care due to the complexity surrounding the eligibility of immigrants for public health insurance programmes and the possibility that parents may adjust their labour supply to maintain eligibility.

⁴ For over 90% of the children in our sample, the household head is their parent. In the majority of the remaining cases, the head is a grandparent. We thus refer to the head as a parent.

⁵ We test whether minimum wages affect the probability of being in our sample by regressing the probability of sample inclusion on the minimum wage and our covariates. We find no evidence of conditional on positive (COP) bias.

⁶ The state-level control variables are listed in appendix Table 1 with their means.

⁷ An appendix provides a summary of all the results discussed in this section that are not shown.

⁸ This group is often thought of as likely unauthorized according to Amuedo-Dorantes and Bansak (2012).

⁹ We also test the robustness of our estimates by 1) dropping some state-level controls which could potentially be affected by the minimum wage, 2) creating a health index of last 5 health outcomes, 3) dropping states with samples of less than 50, and 4) dropping the four states with the largest immigrant populations. We find no effects in these specifications which are available from the authors upon request.

¹⁰ These results are also in our appendix.