When the minimum wage goes up, the robots come for people's jobs. That's the upshot of a paper published today on the National Bureau of Economic Research's website (abstract, full PDF paywalled), which analyzed how changes to the minimum wage from 1980 to 2015 affected low-skill jobs in various sectors of the U.S. economy. 

The new analysis, by Grace Lorden of the London School of Economics and David Neumark at the University of California, Irvine, suggests that there's a similar negative effect among people who work minimum-wage jobs that machines can do. The researchers found that across all industries they measured, raising minimum wage by $1 equates to a decline in "automatable" jobs—things like packing boxes or operating a sewing machine—of 0.43 percent.

For the full story, please visit https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608636/increasing-minimum-wage-puts-more-jobs-at-risk-of-automation/.