Lunchtime Must-Read: Daniel Kuehn: Study Design and the Minimum-Wage Debate

Daniel Kuehn: Study Design and the Minimum-Wage Debate: “Studies that match labor markets…

… experiencing a minimum-wage increase with an appropriate comparison labor market… tend to find that minimum-wage increases have little or no effect on employment…. Studies that do not match labor markets experiencing a minimum-wage increase with a comparison labor market tend to find that minimum-wage increases reduce employment…. Labor market policy analysts strongly prefer studies that match ‘treatment’ with ‘comparison’ cases in a defensible way over studies that simply include controls and fixed effects in a regression model…