Greg Mankiw Battles the Minimum Wage

Greg Mankiw uses his column today to take on the minimum wage. He criticizes President Obama for citing studies showing that the minimum wage has little or no effect on employment and points to studies finding that a higher minimum wage will lead to modest declines in employment. (See John Schmitt's excellent paper for a quick review of the state of the research.) Mankiw says that we should think of the minimum wage as a hidden tax that hits low wage employers.

Mankiw argues that if we want t...