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. … Interestingly, a study of Seattle's new law, released in June, suggested that cuts to working hours meant people were actually losing as much as $125 a month. The new analysis, by Grace Lordan 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.

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