In a post on proposals to raise the minimum wage, Kevin Drum comments:
“it’s worth noting that virtually all the evidence on the anti-minimum wage side is either anecdotal or theoretical. The evidence on the pro-minimum wage side is concrete and statistical.”
Yet the very story he cites as the basis for this proposition reports otherwise.
In a new report, economists David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board say a review of more than 90 studies in more than 15 countries since the early 1990s shows nearly two-thirds of the studies find a “consistent” though not always statistically significant negative impact on employment. Fewer than 10 found a consistently positive impact. While there’s “no consensus,” they say, “the weight of empirical evidence” supports the traditional view.
UPDATE: I am not sure, but this appears to be the Neumark-Wascher study referred to in the WSJ story. From the conclusion:
In general, our results provide evidence that minimum wages tend to reduce employment rates among the youth population. A clear negative correlation between the level of the minimum wage and youth employment-to-population ratios appears both in the raw data, and in time-series cross-section regressions relating employment rates to minimum wages, with controls for overall economic conditions and cross-country variation in labor market policies and institutions. The disemployment effects also appear in models that control for country-specific factors (including country-specific time trends), indicating that the results are not solely driven by cross-country differences in minimum wage levels and youth employment rates.