David Card and Alan B. Krueger have already made national news with their pathbreaking
research on the minimum wage. Here they present a powerful new challenge to the
conventional view that higher minimum wages reduce jobs for low-wage workers. In a work
that has important implications for public policy as well as for the direction of economic
research, the authors put standard economic theory to the test, using data from a series of
recent episodes, including the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, the 1988 rise …

This volume (beginning with its title) exudes hubris. The myth, which the authors promise to
debunk, is that increases in the minimum wage have negative employment effects. This is to
be replaced by a" new" economics of the minimum wage. Their book probes aspects of
intellectual history, propounds some novel theoretical and methodological ideas, lectures its
readers on technical aspects of econometrics, and prescribes public policy, despite frequent
disclaimers. In the introductory chapter, Card and Krueger resurrect the 1946-47 Stigler …