Untitled topic

If you'd like some real criticism of the UW study, the author of the Berkeley one has published a letter which goes over a lot of the methodological problems.

http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-F...

Here's the best points, I'd say the UW study is quite problematic.

The UW report excludes multi-site businesses from its dataset, which removes 48 percent of Seattle’s low-paid workforce out of their study.3 This major exclusion raises a big red caution flag about the representativeness of their sample and therefore about the interpretation of their findings. Yet the UW report provides essentially no evidence that their sample is representative of all jobs in Seattle and Washington.

In the UW data set, workers who leave a single-site business for a multi-site business to benefit from the higher wage mandate or because they received a better offer are not counted in the wage gains, but are counted in jobs lost. Seattle's policy essentially sets a higher minimum wage for all multi-site businesses, counting them as large employers.4 The exclusion of multi-site businesses, which is not standard in studies that use these data, may therefore create major biases in their results. Of course, some employees may move from multi-site businesses to single site businesses, but this mobility direction is likely to be smaller. It is not possible to estimate the size of this bias without access to the underlying data.

The UW report focuses only on jobs that had paid less than $19, which surprisingly is much too low. Table 3 of the UW report indicates that the number of jobs paying under $19 in all single-site businesses fell by about 6000 between 2014 and 2016. Yet the number of single-site jobs at all pay levels in Seattle increased by about 44,000 in the same period. This pattern of average higher pay and more employment appears also in food services: a decline of about 150 jobs paying under $19 from 20014 to 2016 and a simultaneous increase of about 4,500 jobs in all pay levels at single-site food service establishments. These numbers represents very good news: Seattle’s pay levels and job numbers both went up, at least among single-site businesses. We want to know, though, how much of this upgrading in overall pay and employment at all pay levels can be attributed just to the minimum wage policy.

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

This is essentially businesses paying people to buy their products. If it worked, businesses would have discovered that and applied it long ago.

The Berkeley study looked only at one industry. Not sure they're in any place to be criticizing "major exclusions."

I'm not qualified to review either paper, but it's worth noting the UW paper was commissioned by the city government to gauge the effect of their own law.

The Berkeley study was written by someone who founded an advocacy group to "support an American version of socialism, with public ownership of production and a government-planned economy to meet social needs rather than the needs of private profit."