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Krueger’s Faulty Minimum-Wage Study
After President Obama tapped Princeton University professor Alan Krueger to chair the Council of Economic Advisors, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote that Krueger “is arguably the leading labor economist in the country” and “known for bringing a near-superhuman rigor” to the subject.
One wonders how any economist would earn a “near-superhuman” superlative for their research. One can particularly wonder in the case of Professor Krueger, who is known for his 1990s academic research that attempted to prove that employee wages were not subject to the laws of supply and demand.
In 1993, Krueger and David Card published a study that examined employment statistics of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania following the Garden State’s minimum wage hike. The authors reported that employment at fast-food chains in New Jersey increased by 13 percent compared to restaurants across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Clinton administration Labor secretary Robert Reich, Senator Kerry, Senator Kennedy, and other luminaries of the Left pointed to the study’s findings to call for raising the minimum wage.
But analysis by independent researchers revealed the Krueger-Card report, which was based on a phone survey in which fast food restaurant managers and assistant managers were asked about their staff size, to be deeply flawed. The Employment Policy Institute analyzed the phone survey results against actual payroll data from the restaurants and concluded that “the data set used in the New Jersey study bears no relation to numbers drawn from payroll records of the restaurants the New Jersey study claims to cover.”
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| Alan Krueger |
By Carrie L. Lukas, Aug. 30, 2014, Nationalreview.com
After President Obama tapped Princeton University professor Alan Krueger to chair the Council of Economic Advisors, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote that Krueger “is arguably the leading labor economist in the country” and “known for bringing a near-superhuman rigor” to the subject.
One wonders how any economist would earn a “near-superhuman” superlative for their research. One can particularly wonder in the case of Professor Krueger, who is known for his 1990s academic research that attempted to prove that employee wages were not subject to the laws of supply and demand.
In 1993, Krueger and David Card published a study that examined employment statistics of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania following the Garden State’s minimum wage hike. The authors reported that employment at fast-food chains in New Jersey increased by 13 percent compared to restaurants across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Clinton administration Labor secretary Robert Reich, Senator Kerry, Senator Kennedy, and other luminaries of the Left pointed to the study’s findings to call for raising the minimum wage.
But analysis by independent researchers revealed the Krueger-Card report, which was based on a phone survey in which fast food restaurant managers and assistant managers were asked about their staff size, to be deeply flawed. The Employment Policy Institute analyzed the phone survey results against actual payroll data from the restaurants and concluded that “the data set used in the New Jersey study bears no relation to numbers drawn from payroll records of the restaurants the New Jersey study claims to cover.”
Read the full story: www.nationalreview.com
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