Some cities plan to raise their wage floors to $15 an hour. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared last month that “every working man and woman in the state of New York deserves $15 an hour as a minimum wage.”

When I started studying the minimum wage 25 years ago, like most economists at that time I expected that the wage floor reduced employment for some groups of workers. But research that I and others have conducted convinced me that if the minimum wage is set at a moderate level it does not necessarily reduce employment. While some employers cut jobs in response to a minimum-wage increase, others find that a higher wage floor enables them to fill their vacancies and reduce turnover, which raises employment, even though it eats into their profits. The net effect of all this, as has been found in most studies of the minimum wage over the last quarter-century, is that when it is set at a moderate level, the minimum wage has little or no effect on employment.

For example, David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, and I found that when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour in 1992 (or from about $7.25 to $8.60 in today’s dollars), job growth at fast-food restaurants in the state was just as strong as it was at restaurants across the border in Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained $4.25 an hour. Equally important — but less well known — within New Jersey, job growth was just as strong at low-wage restaurants that were constrained by the law to raise pay as it was at higher-wage restaurants that were not directly affected by the increase since their workers already earned more than the new minimum.

I am frequently asked, “How high can the minimum wage go without jeopardizing employment of low-wage workers? And at what level would further minimum wage increases result in more job losses than wage gains, lowering the earnings of low-wage workers as a whole?”