subeniwal / historicalminwage

This repository contains the raw data, code, and sources used to create state and sub-state historical minimum wage datasets originally described in Vaghul and Zipperer (2016).

State and sub-state historical minimum wage data

The repository creates daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual panel datasets of historical state and sub-state minimum wages.

Latest data

Do you just want the data? Go here for the latest release containing data through December 31, 2022.

The data is available as Excel .xlsx spreadsheets or Stata .dta files, along with .pdf files of the sources for all of the historical changes.

Documentation

This replication package contains the Stata code and raw spreadsheets needed to create state-level and sub-state-level minimum wage datasets.

The original release of this data is described in Vaghul and Zipperer (2016), available here.

To replicate the data, clone this repository, set your Stata working directory to the code/ directory, and run state_mw.do and then substate_mw.do. Running the code will update and replace the contents of the exports/ and release/ folders.

File contents

code/

These do-files create all of the datasets.

• state_mw.do - creates a state-level data
• substate_mw.do - creates substate-level data (requires output of state_mw.do)

rawdata/

The do-files require the following spreadsheets:

• SubstateMinimumWage_Changes.xlsx - substate-level changes
• StateMinimumWage_Changes.xlsx - state-level changes
• FederalMinimumWage_Changes.xlsx - federal changes
• FIPS_crosswalk.xlsx - state geography