Penn Capital-Star
March 28, 2019
An SEIU activist rallies for a $15/hr. minimum wage, which was one of the policies that F&M researchers polled in their most recent public opinion survey. (Stephen Melkisethian/Flickr Commons)
By Stephen Herzenberg
The death of Princeton economist Alan Krueger last week brought back into the national news stories about his pioneering data-driven research, some of which showed that job growth does not suffer when states raise their minimum wage.
I met Alan when we were both at graduate school and then again in his first stint in Washington, D.C., as chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor. He was soft spoken but intense, with a passion for designing creative empirical research and letting the data lead where it led.
The most famous example was his analysis of state minimum wage increases with fellow-economist David Card. Krueger and Card seized on a “natural experiment” that resulted when New Jersey increased its minimum wage in the early 1990s.
The researchers conducted a phone survey of fast-food restaurants in neighboring parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, just across the border from each other and with similar economic environments.
Using neighboring Pennsylvania fast food restaurants as a “control group” enabled the researchers to attribute any difference in fast food employment growth in New Jersey to the minimum wage increase. The found no difference in fast food job growth between the two states.
This research drew attacks from conservative critics financed by and relying, it turned out, on data manipulated by a restaurant industry think tank. Krueger and his co-author obtained administrative payroll data from New Jersey and Pennsylvania and confirmed their original findings.
Since the original Card and Krueger study, its basic approach has been replicated on a larger scale with better data. One 2010 study compared neighboring counties along every state border in the country, capitalizing on the many cases of one state increasing a minimum wage while another one didn’t.
Read more at https://www.penncapital-star.com/commentary/show-me-the-data-heres-the-argument-for-raising-pas-minimum-wage-opinion/.
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