Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics

The employment consequences of increasing the minimum wage in the United States continue to be a major subject of debate, but how researchers choose to estimate the effects of raising the minimum wage can substantially affect the results of their work. In “Credible Research Designs for Minimum Wage Studies”, my coauthors and I examine one group of low-wage workers—teenagers—whose hourly wages are significantly raised by minimum wage increases.

A common objection to raising minimum wages is that doing so will reduce the employment opportunities of low-skilled workers such as teenagers. We show, however, that some studies find negative effects of the minimum wage on teen employment because they fail to control for other economic factors that independently reduced employment around the time of a minimum wage increase. After controlling for these factors, we demonstrate that the large, negative effect on teen employment disappears.