Minimum Wage

The Card-Kreuger Study

• Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania David Card; Alan B. Krueger The American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No. 4. (Sep., 1994), pp. 772-793.

• "The Effect of New Jersey's Minimum Wage Increase on Fast-Food Employment: A Re-Evaluation Using Payroll Records," David Neumark & William Wascher. Card and Kreuger's employment data was bad. They got it by phoning up restaurants---or having research assistants do it. N-W got administrative payroll data from the restaurants. This took 5 years to appear in print, as: Neumark, David, and William Wascher. 2000. “Minimum Wages and Employment: A. Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment.” Amer­ican Economic Review 90, no. 5 (December): 1362-1396.

• [https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/neumarkwascher-bitch-slap-cardkrueger/ citing the N-W book, p.>71 3.4.5 Reactions to the State Case Studies:

The Card-Krueger data were elicited from a survey that asked managers or assistant managers “How many full-time and part-time workers are employed in your res­taurant, excluding managers and assistant managers?” This question is highly ambiguous, as it could refer to the current shift, the day, or per­haps the payroll period, and the respondents’ interpretation of it could differ in the observations covering the periods before and after the minimum wage increase. In contrast, the payroll data referred unam­biguously to the payroll period used by the restaurant. Reflecting this difference, the data collected by Card and Krueger had much greater variability across the two observations than did the payroll data, with changes that were sometimes implausible...

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In contrast both to their original study and to our replication, their reanalysis generally finds small and statistically insignificant effects of the increase in New Jersey’s mini­mum wage on employment, and they conclude that “the increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage probably had no effect on total employ­ment in New Jersey’s fast-food industry, and possibly had a small pos­itive effect”.

Other Stuff

• "Reconciling the evidence of Card and Krueger (1994) and Neumark and Wascher (2000)," Olli Ropponen, J. Applied Econometrics, 2011. I don't know if this is any good.

• "Replicating Card and Krueger’s Minimum Wage Study in R,"

Aaron Mamula, 6/17/2021. A nice replication with links to the original data. No surprises.

Brown, Charles. 1995. “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage: Comment.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 48, no. 4 (July): 828-830.

Deere, Donald, Kevin M. Murphy, and Finis Welch. 1995. “Employment and the 1990­1991 Minimum-Wage Hike.” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 85, no. 2 (May): 232-237.

Freeman, Richard B. 1995. “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Mini­mum Wage: Comment.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 48, no. 4 (July): 830-834.

Hamermesh, Daniel S. 1995. “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Mini­mum Wage: Comment.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 48, no. 4 (July): 835-838.

Kim, Taeil, and Lowell J. Taylor. 1995. “The Employment Effect in Retail Trade of Califor­nia’s 1988 Minimum Wage Increase.” Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 13, no. 2 (April): 175-182.

Welch, Finis. "Myth and Measurement: The New

Economics of the Minimum Wage: Review
Symposium: Comment." Industrial and Labor
Relations Review, July 1995, 48(4), pp. 842-49.