Higher Minimum Wage Leads to Less Smoking.

• Position: YOUR LIFE - Brief article

Lower-wage workers who received a one-dollar-an-hour raise due to an increase in the minimum wage report a four percent decrease in smoking, states research from three universities. There also could be other benefits to raising the minimum wage, including increasing birth weight of babies of lower-educated mothers and an improvement in mental health.

The study was conducted by senior author J. Paul Leigh, professor of health economics at the University of California, Davis, along with coauthors Juan Du, associate professor of economics at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Va., and Wesley A. Leigh, graduate teaching assistant at the University of Nevada, Reno. They performed a metaanalysis of 15 studies on minimum wages and public health from the U.S. and United Kingdom covering 1995 to 2016.

The researchers investigated outcomes that include self-rated health, alcohol abuse, absence from work, obesity, and depression. The one consistent across all studies was that increases in minimum wages resulted in declines in smoking among low-wage employees. This especially was...