Final project for ECON 396: Topics in Economics (R for Data Visualizations) analyzing cost of living and minimum wage
In 2012, two hundred fast food workers in New York City walked off the job and demanded that they needed an increase in their pay in order to sustain livable conditions ("About Us"). This was the start of the movement soon to be known as "Fight for 15", a global movement on raising minimum wage in order to protest for a 15 dollar minimum wage globally.
Of course, this movement was met by many critics. A time-series meta-analysis on minimum wage stated that "one of the best-known predictions of standard economic theory is that an increase in the minimum wage will lower employment of low-wage workers" (Card, Krueger, 1995). And to add to the debate, what determines minimum wage anyways, and is there a reason why certain states have different middle wages? How does each state's individual cost of living indexes relate to the toal? Can a person reasonably sustain off of a minimum wage employment? Should they have to?
The purpose of this project is to examine these questions, and determine how different cost of living standards and indexes affect the way that people in the United States live. This project will examine the relationship between Cost of Living and Minimum wage throughout the United States. As government plays a role on determining minimum wage on a state by state basis, I want to see if states with higher cost of living will have higher minimum wages, and other relationships examined throughout the dataset.
To find the most accurate and up to date information on Cost of Living Indexes and Minimum Wage throughout the United States, I looked at online resources in order to find my dataset.
The first source was the Cost of Living Dataseries First Quarter 2017 from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center which rates different states in terms of their cost of living over multiple aspects. I chose this dataset particularly because it allows you to focus on the different areas that make up cost of living, and with this I would be able to see which areas in the cost of living are the highest as well when doing my research. Data Source: https://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/ There is no direct download file, so I took the data from the First Quarter 2017 Cost of Living file and downloaded it to an excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is called COLI.xlsx.
The second source came from the dataset found on Wage and Hour Division (WHD) - Minimum Wage Laws in the States - July 1, 2017 conducted by United States Department of Labor. This was new data updated on July of 2017 with the states minimum wages, and the interesting aspect of this dataset is that it also breaks it up into which states fall above or below the federal minimum wage, and even separate states that don't have a minimum wage. Data Source: https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm. There is no direct download file, so I took the data from the Consolidated State Minimum Wage Update Table (Effective Date: 07/01/2017) table at the bottom of the website and downloaded it to an excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is called mw.xlsx.