Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties
利用美国州界两侧相邻县的政策差异，识别最低工资对餐饮等低薪行业收入和就业的影响，发现没有不利就业效应，传统方法因忽略地方经济条件而产生虚假负面结果。
We use policy discontinuities at state borders to identify the effects of minimum wages on earnings and employment in restaurants and other low-wage sectors. Our approach generalizes the case study method by considering all local differences in minimum wage policies between 1990 and 2006. We compare all contiguous county pairs in the United States that straddle a state border and find no adverse employment effects. We show that traditional approaches that do not account for local economic conditions tend to produce spurious negative effects due to spatial heterogeneities in employment trends that are unrelated to minimum wage policies. Our findings are robust to allowing for long-term effects of minimum wage changes. (c) 2010 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.