The employment effect of minimum wage using 77 international studies since 1992: A meta-analysis

Until the early 90’s a strong consensus existed among economists that minimum wage has negative employment effects. However, in 1992, the studies by Card (1992a) and Katz and Krueger (1992), who found insignificant and slightly positive effects, respectively, came to create a schism. Since then a divergence of views expressed by conflicting empirical studies exists in the literature. In our paper, we use a meta-sample of 77 international studies from 18 countries to investigate this relationship. Our analysis suggests that there is evidence of publication selection, but no effect of minimum wages on employment measures. Additionally, using 27 moderators as potential explanatory variables in order to explain the variation among studies, we find that study characteristics related to the data, the model specifications and the group concerned, diversify the degree of the effect.