This is a hack job, an out-and-out piece of propaganda trying to dismiss a study the author doesn't like the conclusions of. > First, their data exclude worker

This is a hack job, an out-and-out piece of propaganda trying to dismiss a study the author doesn't like the conclusions of. > First, their data exclude workers at businesses that have more than one location; in other words, while workers at a standalone mom-and-pop restaurant show up in their results, workers at Starbucks and McDonald’s don’t. The UW report actually discusses this: > Multi-location firms may respond differently to local minimum wage laws. On the one hand, firms with establishments inside and outside of the affected jurisdiction could more easily absorb the added labor costs from their affected locations, and thus would have less incentive to respond by changing their labor demand. On the other hand, such firms would have an easier time relocating work to their existing sites outside of the affected jurisdiction, and thus might reduce labor demand more than single-location businesses. Survey evidence collected in Seattle at the time of the first minimum wage increase, and again one year later, increase suggests that multi-location firms were in fact more likely to plan and implement staff reductions. Our employment results may therefore be biased towards zero. It's irresponsible to criticize the report for not including multi-site employees without mentioning the conclusions of this survey data. > Second, the University of Washington team does not present enough data for us to assess the validity of its “synthetic control” in Washington — that is, the set of areas to which they compare the results they observe in Seattle. The synthetic controls are probably the most complicated part of the report, and the part that seems the most open to criticism. But the UW report used two different controls for for changes in employment, and both of them lead to similar conclusions about the effects of the minimum wage. It's possible that there are other synthetic controls that yield different results. The WaPo article says that the "Berkely researchers take a better approach" to synthetic controls, but doesn't note that the UW study can't use that approach because the data that enabled the UW study isn't collected nationally. Also, saying "the new studys' findings are out of step with a large body of research" ignores that the UW paper duplicated the findings of that large body of research, and discussed how the more expressive dataset they had (being able to actually identify low-income workers instead of using a proxy like "restaraunt workers" or "teenagers" is the biggest difference between this and other studies) leads them to different conclusions. And saying the UW study has "important limitations," but not saying the same thing about the Berkely study, which was only able to look at workers in one sector (restaraunts), is a pretty clear indicator of where the author's sympathies lie.