At the risk of coming across like a naysayer, this paper omits a lot of crucial details. The obvious, and most usually contested metric is not whether or not t

At the risk of coming across like a naysayer, this paper omits a lot of crucial details. The obvious, and most usually contested metric is not whether or not the economy goes up or down, but by how much it might have gone up or down in the absence of a minimum wage policy. A year-over-year growth of 82% might be meaningful, but without knowing whether it would have been 60% or 120% otherwise, doesn't really tell us what we need to know. Less obvious is the effect this has on any individual business. If there are 10 restaurants in TownX, and TownX raises the minimum wage, we don't know how many of those restaurants survived or thrived as the result of the wage increase just because the restaurant economy went up whatever percent. If six of the smaller restaurants had to close, with the other four expanding to fill the holes they left, is it a net good if we're simply concentrating the wealth away from the small business owner into the hands of national chains?