Here's David Neumark in this morning's Wall Street Journal arguing that next month's minimum wage increase will be particularly ill-timed. His book with William Wascher on minimum wages is on my summer reading list, I'll be reviewing a book on "living wages" in the history of economic thought for EH.net this month.

Last summer, Charles Courtemanche and I have played with the data to see if minimum wage increases increase or decrease social capital in a followup to our earlier paper on Walmart and social capital. Identification issues meant that our result wasn't meaningful. If you're curious, we found a positive relationship, but this could just as easily mean that places with strong social capital tend to be support high minimum wages. Further, a lot of our measures of social capital (playing cards with friends, for example) could increase because the opportunity cost of card-playing is a lot lower when you're unemployed or under-employed. That paper is in the freezer for the time being while we finish some of our other projects. Here are David Henderson's thoughts on high-wage policies and economic downturns.

If you're looking for a good morning read to complement Neumark's WSj piece, here is an excellent and accessible summary of the economics of the minimum wage and the state of the art in the empirical literature that Professor Neumark prepared for the Show-Me Institute in 2006. It's a staple of my econ 101 reading list.

Update: Shelby County is primed to pass a "prevailing wage law."