Harvard Study: Minimum Wage Hike Forcing Businesses to Close

A Harvard Business School study found out that San Francisco’s minimum wage hike is forcing businesses to go out of business before it is fully implemented. Here’s an excerpt from the study, per the Washington Examiner:

“We provide suggestive evidence that higher minimum wage increases overall exit rates among restaurants, where a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit,” report Dara Lee and Michael Luca, authors of “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.” The study used as a case study San Francisco, which has an estimated 6,000 restaurants in the Bay Area and is ratcheting up its minimum wage. Restaurants are one of the largest employers of minimum wage workers.

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