But minimum wages are only part of the story. Ernie Tedeschi , an economist at Evercore ISI, estimates that the minimum-wage increases account for a quarter to a third of low-wage workers’ gains over the past three years. The rest is most likely a result of a tightening labor market that is forcing employers to raise pay even for workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder.

Ms. Gimbel noted that better-paying industries had experienced faster job growth in recent months, while the fastest wage growth had been in lower-paying industries. That could indicate that sectors like health care and manufacturing are snapping up workers, forcing retailers and restaurants to raise pay to compete.

Still, not everyone is benefiting equally. African-American workers have seen smaller gains over the course of the recovery, for example. And wage growth remains slow in some parts of the country that were hit especially hard by the recession.

[One challenge has been to provide better-paid jobs to workers without a bachelor’s degree. Here’s a look at where to find them.]

What took so long?

Many economists were puzzled by the slow pace of pay increases because it looked as if a fundamental relationship had broken down.

Decades ago, economists observed that when unemployment falls, wages tend to rise, as companies are forced to offer higher pay to attract workers. Yet even as the unemployment rate fell from 10 percent in 2009 to less than 5 percent in 2016, wages rose slowly . Even now, with the unemployment rate near multidecade lows, wages are not rising as quickly as standard models suggest they should be.