Back in February, I did a post “Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West: Effects of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics” sympathetic to Jonathan and Jeremy’s claims. Arindrajit Dube has now seriously questioned those findings, writing that the lower employment growth is in manufacturing, where the minimum wage is not very relevant, while it is hard to find employment effects in retail, accomodation and food services, where one would expect the minimum wage to matter if it matters much anywhere. 

One interesting possibility is that (a) at US levels minimum wages do not have very big economic effects, but (b) the urge to raise minimum wages is positively correlated with other policy views that are more harmful to employment growth.