But others immediately pushed back at that notion, and quite hard. Becker wrote that the Card and Krueger studies had “serious defects,” and other economists—including Donald Deere, Finis Welch, and Kevin Murphy—spelled them out in detail. A major flaw, it turned out, was the shortness of the sample periods used in the case studies, which didn’t allow enough time for the negative employment effects to show up. “Subsequent research has tended to confirm evidence of adverse longer-run effects of minimum wages on employment,” explained Neumark and Wascher. Similarly, a 1997 study from the
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