Effects of Recent Minimum Wage Policies in California and Nationwide: Results from a Pre-specified Analysis Plan

We received support for this research from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI). EPI had the right to make comments on a draft of this paper, but had no control over the final content. (The contract language states: “EPI and their reviewers may make suggestions about analysis and conclusions, but final decisions about the content of the paper are up to the Principal Investigator.”) All of the analysis is based on a pre-specified analysis plan registered before the last two years of data on minimum wage effects we analyze, which includes some new minimum wages, were released. The pre-analysis plan (PAP) for this project – which includes computer code – was registered on September 24, 2019, on the Open Science Framework, under the name “City Minimum Wages in the United States.” The PAP will be made public with the release of the working paper including 2019 data – the final analysis committed to in the pre-analysis plan. We thank Sylvia Allegretto, Anna Godøy, Carl Nadler, and Michael Reich for sharing the code from Allegretto et al. (2018). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.