Association of Federal and State Level Minimum Wage Legislations and Food Security

Objective: Examine whether federal and state-level minimum wage increases were associated with reductions in the fraction of households that report food security in the US. Methods: We combined household-level food security and individual-level demographic data from the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Food Supplement for the years 1998 through 2019 (22 years, pre-COVID) with state-level minimum wage data from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. A pooled sample of 962,756 individual-year observations was used in a linear probability model. The outcome was a binary indicator for low food security or very low food security, and the primary independent variable was the state-level minimum wage (inflation adjusted to 2019 dollars). Covariates included age, sex, race/ethnicity, marital status, education, metropolitan population size, year fixed effects, and county fixed effects allowing control for time-invariant unobserved county confounders. Results: A one-dollar increase of the minimum wage was not associated with low food security prevalence but was associated with a statistically significant decrease of 0.16% (95%CI, −0.27 to −0.04%), corresponding to a 3.58 lower prevalence rate in very low food security. Models that allowed for potentially heterogeneous minimum wage policy effects across race/ethnicity or sex showed significantly larger effects only for the other race/ethnicity subgroup. Conclusions: Minimum wage legislation may reduce very low food security prevalence rates, and it may also not significantly reduce existing disparity gaps in very low food security prevalence across race/ethnicity and sex.