Arin Dube

You know, as I like to sometimes say, the silver lining of dysfunctional policymaking is that they provide us with natural experiments.

So it's not a great way to set federal minimum wage to let it not...

change for over 17 years, but it did mean that 30 states now have raised their minimum wage.

On average today, those 30 states have something a little over $14 an hour minimum wages.

In contrast, the other 20 states, the minimum wage remains $7.25.

That is so low, by the way, that it's essentially like not having a minimum wage because very few people actually get paid that little.

So we're basically for the first time since the 1930s, when we first introduced the minimum wage, we have like a little less than half the country with

no minimum wage versus the other half, sometimes with fairly strong minimum wage, maybe even the levels of close to UK or France.

So this is a contrast.

And so what I did is to look to see this is really simple.

You know, sometimes getting causal evidence of any policy or something like that, which we economists, you know, spend a lot of time trying to figure out.

It's hard.

It's hard work and people disagree, etc.

But this is one of those cases where it's actually pretty straightforward.

You just look and look at these 30 states.

Look at these 20 states.

Just plot what happens to their wages.

Plot what happens to their share of people who are working.

And it turns out that tells us a pretty compelling story.

Yeah.