Two of the Cornell ILR School’s statewide mapping and data visualization portals — the Cornell ILR Wage Atlas and the New York State (NYS) Digital Equity Portals — received sweeping updates in the first quarter of 2024.

What’s New with the Wage Atlas?

The 2024 edition of the Cornell ILR Wage Atlas brings a significant expansion to the tools available for studying minimum wage in NYS. First, users are now able to generate basic answers to the question of “Who are minimum wage workers” at statewide and regional levels of analysis. Tools show the estimated probability of earning minimum wage for NYS workers as a whole, as well as by race-ethnicity, gender, age, and industry. Further, the tools breakdown the universe of likely minimum wage earners by race-ethnicity and age. These tools bust the myth that most minimum wage workers are teenagers working part-time or seasonal jobs. Rather, the data show that only 23.7% of NYS’s minimum wage workers are Gen Zers, born in 1997 or later. The plurality of minimum wage workers are millennials in their 30s or 40s, and most (46.1%) minimum wage workers are white.

In addition to exploring the characteristics of New York’s minimum wage workforce, the Atlas continues to give users the ability to simulate a new (single-tier) minimum wage for the state of New York. Unlike the earlier version of the Wage Atlas, though, which only reported the number and racial-ethnic breakdown of workers who would benefit from the user’s proposed NYS minimum wage, the 2024 Wage Atlas enables users to estimate the broader impacts of raising statewide minimum wage to the proposed level. With the help of statewide economic multiplier data from the BEA RIMS II program, the tools first quantify the level of investment, by industry, that would need to happen to raise workers’ wages to the user-proposed minimum; from there, BEA multipliers allow users to estimate how much total earnings in the NYS economy would increase following the implementation of the new minimum wage, as well as the number of jobs expected to be created to accommodate the growth in consumer spending/demand expected to arise from growth in total earnings. As an example, if one were to set the NYS minimum wage to be $21.25, which was the level proposed in a bill that was introduced to the NYS legislature last year, then the tools reveal that employees currently earning below that level would see their aggregate earnings increase by roughly $49 billion. Factoring in earnings increases that would be expected to occur throughout the economy as a result of this investment, total earnings in the NYS economy are estimated to increase by $80.6 billion. The growth in consumer spending/demand that this increase would set off is expected to give rise to the creation of nearly 76,000 new jobs across NYS. Under this new minimum wage, the probability of earning a living wage is estimated to increase from 50.9% to 65.4%. Click below to access the updated Wage Atlas:

What’s New with the NYS Digital Equity Portal?

When the NYS Digital Equity Portal first launched in late 2021, all data and indicators were collected and mapped at the census tract level of analysis. However, census tracts frequently cross the boundaries of “higher level” summary geographies like ZIP codes and legislative districts. When the Buffalo Co-Lab team began updating the Portal in summer 2023, Cornell University High Road Fellow Asher Cai worked with the team to collect updated data and develop the architecture for disaggregating ACS data to the block level. In Fall 2023, a “soft launch” of that new feature — which allows for more precise data summaries and can now accommodate summaries for small areas like towns and villages — was released with data from the then-current 2017-21 Census ACS. The current (2024) version of the Portal now features the latest (2018-22) ACS data, which will remain current through the end of 2024. The new version of the portal makes it possible to understand how home-based access to high-speed Internet has changed over time — highlighting both steps toward and remaining barriers to achieving full digital equity in NYS. Click below to access the updated portal.