Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics

In this technical report, we document a methodology developed by the UC Berkeley Labor Center to estimate the number of workers impacted by proposed local minimum wage laws, as well as the expected increase in wages. This methodology is similar to that used by researchers to generate impact estimates for national and state minimum wage proposals, but differs in several respects because of significant data limitations for city- or county-based analyses.

In Section A, we describe the data source, sample definition, and wage variable creation and cleaning. In Section B, we then describe the process for estimating the number of workers affected and the expected increase in wages.