Georgescu-Roegen prize in economics.

• Position: Announcements

The annual Georgescu-Roegen Prize in Economics was awarded to Joseph J. Sahia, United States Military Academy, and Richard V. Burkhauser, Cornell University, at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Economic Association.

The award is given to the author or authors of the article selected by the prize committee as the best to appear in the Southern Economic Journal in the previous volume year. This year's winner is "Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor" by Joseph J. Sabia and Richard V. Burkhauser. The article appeared in the January 2010 issue, Volume 76, Number 3.

Proposals to increase the minimum wage are politically popular because they are widely seen as an effective way to assist the working poor. However, evidence regarding the effects of past minimum wage increases provide little more than symbolic support for the notion that minimum wage increases actually help this population. Nevertheless, a new set of large state and federal minimum wage increases was initiated between 2003 and 2007, with one motivation being to support this group. Even more recently there have been congressional proposals to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour.

Sabia and Burkhauser examine the effectiveness of these recent and proposed minimum wage increases on the working poor. Carefully analyzing data drawn from multiple years of the March Current Population Survey (CPS), these authors demonstrate that higher minimum wages are an increasingly ineffective means of improving the...