The evidence on increasing minimum wage is mixed. With half finding no effect, and half finding a small negative effect. But one side has a very clear concise

The evidence on increasing minimum wage is mixed. With half finding no effect, and half finding a small negative effect. But one side has a very clear concise mechanism and the other is kind of handwavy. And almost all economists believe increasing minimum wage will decrease employment, the question is how much and how do you weight this decrease in employment against increase take home pay. JW Mason's blog he quotes a lot of studies to "support" his post but here is a list of the studies he quotes. What you'll find are all the ones that even address the question find "rent control decreases rental housing, decreases rental quality, definitely decreases rent in the short term (maybe increases maybe decreases long term), and increases tenant lifespan". These are all the same things an econ 101 class would tell you. He's definitely using these studies for support and not illumination. Here's a list of all the papers he quoted and what they said. 2007 study by David Sims The sudden end of rent control in Massachusetts in 1995 provides a natural experiment to study the effects of rent control. My results indicate that the intuition presented in simple microeconomic models is correct. Rent control decreases the quantity of rental units supplied, as well as rent and unit maintenance. It also lengthens renter stays. In addition, some evidence suggests that rent control produces small spillover effects that decrease the rent of uncontrolled units in controlled areas 2014 study by Autor, Palmer, and Pathak Doesn't really look at his question at all. We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-controlled units, accounting for a quarter of the $7.8 billion in Cambridge residential property appreciation during this period. The majority of this contribution stems from induced appreciation of never-controlled properties. Residential investment explains only a small fraction of the total 2007 study by Gilderbloom and Ye In general, conventional generalizations about rent control do not distinguish between moderate and restrictive controls in the housing market. There has been a great deal of change in the last few decades as rent controls have moved from being restrictive to more moderate forms. This article examined a moderate form of rent control, looking at 76 regulated cities in New Jersey. Moderate rent control in New Jersey stands as symbolic rather than distributional reform. Our research suggests that the pressure of real estate groups, government, and the courts has made modern-day rent control laws toothless in terms of their impact on rents. A similar finding has been found in southern California (Heskin et al., 2000). About the only measurable impact is that landlords may have cleverly reduced the size of rental units to create more units and profit in rent control cities. At best, it appears that most rent control ordinances have only succeeded in preventing rent increases that are excessive. These ordinances have also provided protection against arbitrary evictions, incentives for maintenance of rentals, and knowledge to tenants about the level of rent increases to expect in the future. Certainly, this is a small improvement for tenants who have had none of these protections in the unfettered market. Our study shows that, as a moderate type of rent control, the rent regulations in New Jersey may have avoided some of the negativity of the conventional regulations 2015 study by Ambrosius, Glderbloom and coauthors This study replicates, using 2010 Census data, and extends past work on moderately rent-controlled municipalities in New Jersey, which began policies to stabilize rents while allowing landlords modest returns in the 1970s. Our approach compares controlled and non-controlled communities over 10,000 persons; and regresses rental housing characteristics (rent and quality/quantity) on two measures of rent control: nominal (1/0) and ordinal (an index of policy diversity/strength). Because the decade 2000–2010 was unique due to the housing bubble and recession, we expand previous analyses by introducing two additional dependent variables: changes in property values, which may be affected by restrictions on rents; and foreclosure rates, a problem affecting investors and a proxy for abandonment. We find that these 40-year-old policies do not exert any statistically-significant effects on their communities’ housing markets once other factors are controlled—a finding which has implications for affordable housing and advocacy in New Jersey and beyond. Diamond McQuade, and Qian in 2018 Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we nd rent control limits renters' mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.