Correlations Between States Inflation Rates and Effective Minimum Wage

This page shows a heatmap and correlation graph to see which states contribute most to the inflation rate. Also shows correlation between wages and inflation rates.

CPI is strongly correlated with the effective minimum wage. This is expected because both increase as time goes up for a majority of the states in the world. There are only a few states that keep the minimum wage near or at federal levels

CPI is naturally expected to increase year over year, as that is an expected characteristic of a healthy economy. This demonstrates that our economy is growing well, although some people might be unhappy with their living standards.

The effective minimum wage is very weakly correlated with the annual inflation rate. This is the main finding that we were looking at. This indicates there are many other factors that cause inflation to flctuate over time. Things like monetary and fiscal policies, unemployment, and interest rate cuts.

Surprisingly Kansas stands out the most, despite most of the treatment group having a higher tradeable sector inflation rate. But perhaps unsurprisngly, we see a lot of states are relatively similar ranging between the 1-1.75% area.

It also seems as though states that are in more regionally exlsuive areas and have lower populations like Mississippi, Colorado, Alabama, and Massachusetts are more prone to inflation.