80 Years Before Card and Krueger By David Henderson

A labor economist friend who studies the minimum wage writes:

I found a 103 year old BLS report on a minimum wage increase in Oregon that had a stronger grasp on credible research design than Card & Krueger. Also, one of the authors is named “Bertha von der Nienburg” and she was 24 when the report was written. If I was the sort of person who did that sort of thing, I’d blog about this.

The study is “Effect of Minimum-wage Determinations in Oregon,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 1915.

The authors are Marie L. Obenauer and Bertha von der Nienburg.

I got a little bogged down working my way through it and the authors don’t come to any strong conclusions. But the care they take and the granularity of their data are amazing.

One of the things they did, besides getting data from many firms affected by the newly implemented minimum wage law, was interview some of the women affected. Here’s an interesting segment from their page 68: