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>The UW study was actually able to duplicate the results of previous studies That's not really true. The negative effect on employment demonstrated in the UW s

>The UW study was actually able to duplicate the results of previous studies That's not really true. The negative effect on employment demonstrated in the UW study is much larger than most previous studies have shown. >There are still possible flaws with the UW study, but the UW study addresses many criticisms in advance I believe it's much more than "possible" flaws and some of them are really quite damning. I don't think many people that read this criticism by Michael Reich (the author of the Berkeley study) could conclude that the UW study is really worth considering. [pdf] http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-Feldstein.pdf http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-F...

Aron 9y ago
The results the commenter was referring to is the fact that prior studies found good results with minimum wage within the restaurant-worker class, and so did this new study. But the new study found that looking at a larger superset of these workers showed poor results for minimum wage.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cwyers 9y ago
Watching the Berkeley people dismiss this study because of how many employees are excluded by not having the multi-site data, when the Berkeley study excludes everyone not working for restaraunts, it's something.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  The problem is that the Seattle law sets the minimum wage of multi-site businesses higher than single-site businesses. The expected effect of this is that minimum wage workers of single-site businesses will quit and work at multi-site businesses for the higher wage. A study looking only at single-site employment counts these people as having left the workforce when they've actually received a raise.
  - Aron 9y ago
    Did the authors of the report make this hypothesis?
  - cwyers 9y ago
    Okay, but if you look at the results of the UW study: > This paper evaluates the wage, employment, and hours effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016. Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase. We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies. There's a few things going on here. 1) Looking at just the restaurant industry, which is all the Berkeley study looked at, the UW study found an effect of zero. It's all the employment sectors Berkeley didn't look at where the UW study found other results. 2) They found a smaller increase in hourly wages than other studies, because they were able to figure out how many employees were earning more than the previous minimum wage but less than the new minimum wage. This should be agnostic to the multi-site data issue. 3) They found that the number of employees held steady and the number of hours worked dropped. That's not the effect that you speculate the lack of multi-site data would lead to.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      1) Looking at other industries doesn't invalidate the multi-site critique. 2) The problem here is they narrowly looked at only a small band; they don't even consider jobs which make more than $19/hr. Consider a hypothetical world where when the minimum wage goes from $12/hr to $13/hr, the people who were already making $13 get raised to $14, those making $14 get a bump to $15 and so on with zero effect on the number of people employed, essentially everyone gets a $1 raise. (Note: I am not saying this is our world.) What would the UW study show? It would show a decrease in labor equal to amount of people previously making between $18.01 and $19.00. All these people have been raised above the $19 boundary and so no longer are counted. So even in a situation with no change in the amount of jobs and only positive wage effects, the UW study will show negative employment effects. This is actually where the difference between Berkeley's positive effect and UW's zero effect comes in, from the pdf I linked previously: This pattern of average higher pay and more employment appears also in food services: a decline of about 150 jobs paying under $19 from 2014 to 2016 and a simultaneous increase of about 4,500 jobs in all pay levels at single-site food service establishments. This actually brings me to one of the biggest problems, also from the pdf above: The UW report nonetheless finds an unprecedented impact of wage increases on jobs, ten times higher than the average in 942 published minimum wage and non-minimum wage estimates, and triple that of minimum wage critic David Neumark.7 There is no reason why Seattle's low-paid employers should be so much more sensitive to wage increases than employers elsewhere. Incredible results demand incredible proof and the UW study does not do a good job at all of providing that proof. EDIT: 3) Whether it's number of jobs or hours of work, both are affected by the $19/hr cap so the difference is inconsequential.

Aron 9y ago

The results the commenter was referring to is the fact that prior studies found good results with minimum wage within the restaurant-worker class, and so did this new study. But the new study found that looking at a larger superset of these workers showed poor results for minimum wage.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

cwyers 9y ago

Watching the Berkeley people dismiss this study because of how many employees are excluded by not having the multi-site data, when the Berkeley study excludes everyone not working for restaraunts, it's something.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
The problem is that the Seattle law sets the minimum wage of multi-site businesses higher than single-site businesses. The expected effect of this is that minimum wage workers of single-site businesses will quit and work at multi-site businesses for the higher wage. A study looking only at single-site employment counts these people as having left the workforce when they've actually received a raise.
- Aron 9y ago
  Did the authors of the report make this hypothesis?
- cwyers 9y ago
  Okay, but if you look at the results of the UW study: > This paper evaluates the wage, employment, and hours effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016. Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase. We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies. There's a few things going on here. 1) Looking at just the restaurant industry, which is all the Berkeley study looked at, the UW study found an effect of zero. It's all the employment sectors Berkeley didn't look at where the UW study found other results. 2) They found a smaller increase in hourly wages than other studies, because they were able to figure out how many employees were earning more than the previous minimum wage but less than the new minimum wage. This should be agnostic to the multi-site data issue. 3) They found that the number of employees held steady and the number of hours worked dropped. That's not the effect that you speculate the lack of multi-site data would lead to.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    1) Looking at other industries doesn't invalidate the multi-site critique. 2) The problem here is they narrowly looked at only a small band; they don't even consider jobs which make more than $19/hr. Consider a hypothetical world where when the minimum wage goes from $12/hr to $13/hr, the people who were already making $13 get raised to $14, those making $14 get a bump to $15 and so on with zero effect on the number of people employed, essentially everyone gets a $1 raise. (Note: I am not saying this is our world.) What would the UW study show? It would show a decrease in labor equal to amount of people previously making between $18.01 and $19.00. All these people have been raised above the $19 boundary and so no longer are counted. So even in a situation with no change in the amount of jobs and only positive wage effects, the UW study will show negative employment effects. This is actually where the difference between Berkeley's positive effect and UW's zero effect comes in, from the pdf I linked previously: This pattern of average higher pay and more employment appears also in food services: a decline of about 150 jobs paying under $19 from 2014 to 2016 and a simultaneous increase of about 4,500 jobs in all pay levels at single-site food service establishments. This actually brings me to one of the biggest problems, also from the pdf above: The UW report nonetheless finds an unprecedented impact of wage increases on jobs, ten times higher than the average in 942 published minimum wage and non-minimum wage estimates, and triple that of minimum wage critic David Neumark.7 There is no reason why Seattle's low-paid employers should be so much more sensitive to wage increases than employers elsewhere. Incredible results demand incredible proof and the UW study does not do a good job at all of providing that proof. EDIT: 3) Whether it's number of jobs or hours of work, both are affected by the $19/hr cap so the difference is inconsequential.