The trouble with most such statistics is context. How much has Seattle's population grown in the same time period? Are there more or less restaurant employees as a percent of the population? Does Amazon's huge hiring surge of highly paid employees skew the results?
Nothing is ever static in economics, it's very hard to do A-B experiments.
Oddly, I didn’t find any of that nuance or context in your original comment. You presented absolutes and the data proved you wrong. Maybe the population has grown by more than 10% in 2.5 years like food service employment. At the same time, the overall unemployment rate has fallen since the wage hikes started.
> You presented absolutes and the data proved you wrong.
I could say an absolute statement that throwing more wood on the fire would make it hotter. If it also happens to drop into the lake, that doesn't prove me wrong. In any such statements, there's an implicit assumption that other effects stay the same, that I am not dropping the fire in the lake.
Seattle has undergone enormous change in the last 5 years due to Amazon. Ignoring that in any cause/effect analysis of the overall city invalidates the analysis.
No, the "trouble" is that exactly the opposite of what you warned would happen actually happened.
What happened was exactly in line with the papers I cited predicted. 1. Large profit hit, 2. small price hike, 3. no effect on employment (employment actually went up, possibly for other reasons).
The reason you believe what you believe is because you swallowed a lot of kool aid. The people concerned about 1 happening want us to think will 3 happen. In Seattle it didn't. In well run studies it didn't.
In propaganda and poorly run economic studies it does.
Yeah, not that one. The one I cited by the UK low pay commission where it found a minimum wage hike was accompanied by a 11% drop in profits and a slight increase in prices (and even then only in the food service industry).
I doubt that anybody has studied the profit drop in Seattle. As an economist, it pays not to look too closely at certain topics and that is definitely one of those topics. It would not help your employability to study that topic at all.
Your employability goes up, however, if your research helps to find results that restaurant associations or "walmarts" with a bit of cash to splash around might find useful.
David Neumark and William Wascher are keenly aware of this, which is probably why they took Card and Krueger's landmark study and twisted it until it showed employment going down after a minimum wage hike.
April 1, 2015 - 135,100 employed
December 2017 - 149,600 employed https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU53426607072200001SA