Before you pontificate on the minimum wage

[Quantum Windbag]

You should read this.

Here is what I think is a fair 30,000 foot summary of the minimum wage debate over the past few years:
David Neumark and co-authors have utilized a panel approach and found that minimum wages do lead to lower employment. Arin Dube and co-athors use an alternative approach that takes cross-state border counties as control groups and find there is no impact. They also find that including additional controls in the panel approach, like census region or state trends, makes Neumarks’ results insignificant, allegedly due to pre-existing trends. Neumark replies that the cross border county grouping doesn’t really lead to optimal control groups. The Dube approach, he alleges, really throws out too much identifying information, and the resulting large standard errors don’t give you a precisely estimated zero impact, but a very noisy estimate. In addition, he argues that the inclusion of additional controls within the time series approach 1) creates questionable counterfactuals, and 2) if you use non-linear instead of linear state level time trends his results hold up. In the most recent reply, Dube questions the econometrics of Neumark’s control group claims. More persuasively, he illustrates the the cross state border county approach can be used to identify effects of the minimum wage on separations and hires, suggesting there is plenty of identifying variation left.
So this is where you are left off. Who has constructed the more reliable counterfactual? Should you specify state time trends and if so how? Does Dube throw out too much useful data? And if so, how does Dube et al identify the impact on separations and hires? I have my thoughts about all of these questions, but my point here is that there are a lot of hard questions raised by this debate, and it is at the very least hard to say who is right.

Why Do Economists Disagree So Much About The Minimum Wage? - Forbes

 

[andy753]

Did you write that and then "quote" it yourself? Or maybe you found it on the interweb, so it's probably true. I found an awesome story about how bigfoot is real, and since it was on the interweb, it's gotta be true. Therefore, I believe your story. Awesome story, bro.