Card, David, and Alan Krueger. (1994) “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” American Economic Review 84: 772–93.
David Card and Alan B. Krueger reported evidence that called into question the conventional view of the labor-market effects of minimum-wage laws. In particular, they surveyed fast-food establishments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in 1992 before and after the minimum wage in New Jersey rose from $4.25 to $5.05. By comparing the changes in employment in these two states, they constructed a simple “difference-in-differences” test of the prediction that minimum-wage increases reduce employment of affected workers. Contrary to this prediction, they find “no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state ...” and in fact that “the increase in the minimum wage increased employment”.
The replication is carried on the main notebook from this repository. The auxiliary folder contains different functions made for the data preparation, regressions and tables, plots, as well as some extra visualizations and extensions. The replication can also be visualized using nbviewer and mybinder:
To ensure the reproducibility of the project, the repository is supported by a GitHub Actions Continuos Integration (CI). The state of my workflow can be found here: