Associate Professor of Economics Featured on Tucson NPR Affiliate

Juan Pantano, associate professor of economics at the Eller College of Management, was featured in an AZPM (Tucson NPR) segment on January 31, discussing the economic impacts of Arizona’s new minimum wage enforcements. 

In the segment, Pantano explains why the effects of the recently-mandated $12 minimum wage might not be as astronomical as expected, as well as how it may affect specific industries compared to the 2016 minimum wage of $8.05 per hour.

“The first thing that you need to look into is how many people are being affected by this and when you look at the numbers, it turns out that it’s not as many as you think,” Pantano explains. “You actually end up seeing only about 3 percent of workers who actually get benefited. So, all this additional money that gets injected into the economy, into the spending power, is relatively small.”   

Pantano earned his PhD in economics in 2008 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the Eller College of Management in 2019. His research centers on a variety of strategies to answer empirical questions in applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on labor economics and health economics. His current research is focused on understanding how parents invest in their children as well as how patients and their doctors make medical treatment choices.