Cengiz et al. 2024 update: minimum wage hikes still show near-zero disemployment of incumbents

New paper out from Cengiz/Dube/Lindner using cross-state minimum wage variation through 2022. Headline findings: - Near-zero disemployment effect among incumbent workers in the affected wage range - Small negative effect on new-entrant hiring (~1.5% lower hiring rates in affected occupations) - Effects concentrated in low-wage regions This is consistent with the monopsony framework — labor markets have meaningful employer power, so minimum wage works more like a price ceiling on monopsony rent than a binding wage floor on a competitive market. Limitations: cross-state variation tops out around $15. We don't have great evidence on what happens at, say, $20 in a low-wage region. The "treatment effect" might be nonlinear. If you're going to disagree, the part to attack is whether the monopsony-rent framing extends to bigger jumps, not whether the data is real.

The framing matters a lot for live policy debates and almost no one engages it on its actual mechanism.