In what has turned into a hot-button issue in this year’s election cycle, the NY Times discusses the myth, often profferred by conservatives, that the minimum wage hurts workers.

The Times reports that:

“An important new study exploiting this opportunity will appear this month in The Review of Economics and Statistics. The economists Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, T. William Lester of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, closely analyze employment trends for several categories of low-wage workers over a 16-year period in all counties sharing a common border with a county in another state where minimum wage increases followed a different trajectory.

They report that increases in minimum wages had no negative effects on low-wage employment and successfully increased the income of workers in food services and retail employment, as well as the narrower category of workers in restaurants.

The study successfully addresses a number of criticisms previously leveled at the case-study approach and points to flaws in all previous studies that have found negative employment effects.

The level of technical discussion is daunting, but if you don’t want to grapple with concepts like “spatially correlated fictitious placebo minimum wages” you can watch a video instead — Arindrajit Dube clearly explains the issues in a 12-minute interview. He emphasizes that higher minimum wages tend to reduce worker turnover, benefiting both workers and employers.”

Go to the New York Times website to read the entire article.