The minimum wage is currently a highly debated topic in US politics.

The Democratic

Party just added raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour to their official party platform. Each

side to this issue is desperate to prove that the evidence is on their side. To help sift through the

vast amount of literature on the topic, authors Doucouliagos and Stanley developed meta-

analysis methods to 64 US minimum wage studies. Their article, Publication Selection Bias in

Minimum-Wage Research? A Meta-Regression Analysis determined the publication selection

bias utilizing a meta-analysis formula from Card and Krugers 1995 article of the same title.

Building upon this past research, Doucouliagos and Stanley determined that after the publication

selection bias is corrected, there is little to no evidence of a negative association between

minimum wages and employment (Doucouliagos & Stanley, 2008).

One of the main arguments against raising the minimum wage is that it will make it more

difficult for teens to gets jobs. This would snowball into less qualified workers in general as the

average person wouldnt start their first job until later in their life. To help clear this issue up,

author Madeline Zavodny, in her article The effect of the minimum wage on employment and

hours seeks to measure the results of raising the minimum wage on teen employment and hours.

Utilizing both state and individual data, Zavodny found that low-wage teens are less likely to

keep their current job relative to high-wage teens when the minimum wage is raised. On the

other hand, there is no adverse relationship between teen working hours and raising the

minimum wage (Zavodny, 2000).

Lang and Kahn in their article, The effect of minimum-wage laws on the distribution of

employment: theory and evidence prove that an increase in the minimum wage increases

employment by attracting more and better applicants to low-wage jobs. This increased

competition from what Lang and Kahn call high productivity workers (Lang & Kahn, 2008)
makes lower productivity workers worse off, without making the high productivity workers any

better off.

Doucouliagos, H., & Stanley, T. (2008). Publication Selection Bias in Minimum-Wage Research?

A Meta-Regression Analysis. Economic Series, 14, 1-38.

Lang, K., & Kahn, S. (1999). The effect of minimum-wage laws on the distribution of

employment: Theory and evidence. Journal of Public Economics, 69 (1), 67-82.

Zavodny, M. (2000). The effect of the minimum wage on employment and hours. Labour

Economics, 7, 729-750.