RERUN
Claim 4

Does raising the minimum wage cost jobs?

Independent rebuild

The study said raising New Jersey's minimum wage didn't cost fast-food jobs. The Lab retraced it: ✓ same result.

Whose code is this?

Our own small program, written from the paper and the authors' codebook and run on their public survey data. It isn't the authors' code. It got 2.7536 against the paper's 2.76, inside the allowed margin of 0.05, and the store averages for both states match Table 3.

See the code

This study changed how economists and lawmakers argue about raising the minimum wage.

What this result means

We test one thing: does this code and data give this number? That's not the same as the science being right. The forecast price never changes the verdict.

See the proof
2.76jobs per store, the paper says. Counts if between 2.71 and 2.81.
Where the number comes fromChange in mean FTE employment: PA -2.16, NJ 0.59, difference 2.76Table 3, row 3, page 780 of the paper

The exact claim as posted

Independent rebuild: does raising the minimum wage cost jobs? Card and Krueger found 2.76 more per store in New Jersey

Card and Krueger (American Economic Review, 1994) compared fast-food restaurants in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage in 1992, with those in eastern Pennsylvania, which didn't. They report that employment per store rose by 2.76 full-time equivalents in New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania. This runs our own small rebuild on the authors' public survey data. The rebuild isn't the authors' code, so a mismatch ends as inconclusive.

RERUNCLAIM #0004

Does raising the minimum wage cost jobs?

Measured in
jobs per store
Paper says
2.76
Counts if
2.71 to 2.81
Lab got
2.7536
VerdictNumbers check out
6450bf0ac8d633cb663eNov 12, 2026

This result is final

Paper said 2.76. We got 2.7536.

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

This slip is the Lab's .

✓ Verified on NEAR. See the contract's history

See the full receipt

  1. People forecast
  2. Forecasting ends
  3. The Lab retraces it
  4. Verdict posted, open to challenge
  5. Winners collect

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.

Reading how the odds moved…

The evidence

See the full receipt

How much evidence is behind this?

Each step is a tougher test. Only the first one decides who wins the market.

  1. 1. ✓

    The Lab's retrace of the code and data named in the claim

    The Lab retraced the code and data and got a number inside the claim's range. YES wins.

  2. 2. –

    Stress test: does the number depend on luck?

    Fetching the extra runs…

  3. 3. –

    Rebuilt from the description (experimental)

    Fetching the AI's rebuild…

Coming next: a data-leakage check, for the same rows in training and test data, and a maths check on the statistics a paper reports. Neither has run on this claim.

Even all three steps can't prove the science is true. They show how well this result stands up to checking.

Verified

Your browser just re-checked these itself, so you don't have to trust this site.

Checking…

What the Lab retraces

Source
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118030
D. Card, A. B. Krueger; rebuild by the RERUN project, Rebuild: MIT. Data: fetched from the authors' site, not redistributed.
Code, at this exact version
https://github.com/Maveri-Q/rerun-rebuilds
commit 7fb7854011967339316694187b906b7cab87f5d3
Commands
python3.11
$ python card-krueger-1994/rebuild.py njmin.zip > rerun_output.txt && cat rerun_output.txt
Where the result is read
rerun_output.txt using regex nj_minus_pa (-?[0-9.]+)
Data files
njmin.zip
fingerprint 41a29aec6b489658b20030d044a2b20a5f5a04b871cde41df057afd6013ba587
Limits
2 CPU, 4 GB, 15 minutes
6450bf0ac8d633cb663e2c8ebeb33fde42b6dd75dcfeee3d3ecc3333a8d6eb1b
Show the claim exactly as stored on the blockchain
{"artifact":{"commit":"7fb7854011967339316694187b906b7cab87f5d3","data":[{"path":"njmin.zip","sha256":"41a29aec6b489658b20030d044a2b20a5f5a04b871cde41df057afd6013ba587","url":"https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/data_sets/njmin.zip"}],"entrypoint":"python card-krueger-1994/rebuild.py njmin.zip > rerun_output.txt && cat rerun_output.txt","output":{"extractor":{"expr":"nj_minus_pa (-?[0-9.]+)","type":"regex"},"path":"rerun_output.txt"},"repo_url":"https://github.com/Maveri-Q/rerun-rebuilds","runtime":"python3.11","setup":[]},"metric":{"comparison":"within_tolerance","name":"change in jobs per store, New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania","reported_value":"2.76","tolerance":{"type":"abs","value":"0.05"}},"private_data":null,"resources":{"cpu":2,"max_minutes":15,"mem_gb":4},"source":{"authors":"D. Card, A. B. Krueger; rebuild by the RERUN project","license":"Rebuild: MIT. Data: fetched from the authors' site, not redistributed.","type":"paper","url":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118030"},"statement":"Card and Krueger (American Economic Review, 1994) compared fast-food restaurants in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage in 1992, with those in eastern Pennsylvania, which didn't. They report that employment per store rose by 2.76 full-time equivalents in New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania. This runs our own small rebuild on the authors' public survey data. The rebuild isn't the authors' code, so a mismatch ends as inconclusive.","title":"Independent rebuild: does raising the minimum wage cost jobs? Card and Krueger found 2.76 more per store in New Jersey","version":1}

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.