Should-Read: Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt: The “high road” Seattle labor market and the effects of the minimum wage increase: Data limitations and methodological problems bias new analysis of Seattle’s minimum wage increase

Should-Read: Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt: The “high road” Seattle labor market and the effects of the minimum wage increase: Data limitations and methodological problems bias new analysis of Seattle’s minimum wage increase: “Jardim et al. (2017), looks at the first two stages of a phased-in set of increases that will eventually take the minimum wage in the city to $15.00 per hour… http://www.epi.org/publication/the-high-road-seattle-labor-market-and-the-effects-of-the-minimum-wage-increase-data-limitations-and-methodological-problems-bias-new-analysis-of-seattles-minimum-wage-incr/

…The authors… find large job losses associated with these first two rounds of increases, in which the minimum wage for most workers rose from $9.47 per hour to $11.00 per hour in April 2015 and then to $13.00 per hour in January 2016…. The estimated employment losses in the Seattle study lie far outside even those generally suggested by mainstream critics of the minimum wage (see, for example, Neumark and Wascher [2008])…. Indeed all of the research cited by the authors implies much smaller and even no employment changes in response to wage increases similar to those experienced so far in Seattle…. The study implausibly finds employment changes due to the minimum wage in parts of the labor market where there should have be none. The study’s own estimates inaccurately imply the minimum wage caused large gains in the number of jobs paying above $19.00 per hour… well above the wage range where the $13.00 minimum wage should be having measurable effects…. The study excludes… all multi-location businesses… bias[ing] their results toward showing job loss if there has been a shift in employment from small, single-location establishments toward larger firms with multiple locations…