The following survey of the academic research on the minimum wage is designed to give nonspecialists a sense of just how isolated the Card, Krueger and Katz studies are. It will also indicate that the minimum wage has wide-ranging negative effects that go beyond unemployment. For example, higher minimum wages encourage employers to cut back on training, thus depriving low wage workers of an important means of long-term advancement, in return for a small increase in current income. For many workers this is a very bad trade-off, but one for which the law provides no alternative.
This short survey is evidence that the science in 1995 (no less, I believe, than in 2013) has decidedly not shown that minimum-wage legislation improves, or that such legislation even fails to worsen, the economic well-being of the very workers that it is ostensibly said to help.
UPDATE: Several people seem to be unable to open the above link. I don’t know what the problem is. I can open it with no problem. I will continue to look for a better link to that paper, which has an extensive list of scholarly studies on the consequences of minimum-wage legislation.
