Does raising the minimum wage cost jobs?

✓ Numbers check out

2.76 jobs per store, the paper

2.7536 jobs per store, the Lab

Counts as holding up

The code and data produced the same result. That doesn't prove the study's method is right.

This was a small rebuild of the famous Card and Krueger finding on the minimum wage: their reported gain of 2.76 full-time-equivalent jobs per store in New Jersey, relative to Pennsylvania, checks out against their public survey data.

Card and Krueger wanted to know whether raising the minimum wage destroys jobs. They surveyed fast-food restaurants in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage in 1992, and in neighboring eastern Pennsylvania, which did not, and compared how employment changed in each state.

Recomputing from the authors' public survey data gave a difference of 2.7536 full-time-equivalent workers per store between the two states, matching the paper's reported 2.76. This only confirms that the same data and arithmetic give the same number; it doesn't show the sample was fair, that payroll records agree, or that the result generalizes.

The text was written by a private AI model on NEAR AI (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash). The verdict and numbers come straight from the blockchain, and the AI can't change them.

What the paper said: Change in mean FTE employment: PA -2.16, NJ 0.59, difference 2.76. Table 3, row 3, page 780 of the paper
What we got: 2.7536
Whose code ran: Independent rebuild
What forecasters thought: 50% expected it to hold up when forecasting closed. The forecast price never changes the verdict.
Proof: Read the receipt or see claim 4

What we didn't check

Whether the sample was fair or large enough.
Whether test data leaked into training or tuning.
Whether the result holds on new data.
Whether the study's method was the right one for its question.
Whether these stores and months say anything about other places or times.
Whether payroll records tell the same story, which later papers argued over.

Community notes

Notes are people's own words, kept on the blockchain. They never change a verdict, and the Lab's AI never reads them. Posting costs a little NEAR for storage, and what isn't used comes back.