This time last year, a study group from the University of Washington reported on the first small steps of Seattle’s minimum-wage increase, and they found a ton of good news: wages in Seattle are up, unemployment is down, and the number of hours worked are up. In other words, the minimum wage increase is doing exactly what it should be doing.

And today, researchers Michael Reich, Sylvia Allegretto, and Anna Godoey from University of California Berkeley have released a new Seattle-area minimum wage study with an even larger scope than the UW team. While the UW team only investigated the first quarter of Seattle’s very first minimum-wage bump on the road to $15, the Berkeley team went wide, “analyz[ing] county and city-level data for 2009 to 2016.” Because we’re the first major city to raise the wage, this is just the first in what the Berkeley team projects to be a long-term study that will examine minimum-wage increases in cities and states around the country.

The Berkeley study put Seattle’s real numbers up against “data from other areas in Washington State and the rest of the U.S. to construct a synthetic control group that matches Seattle for a nearly six-year period before the minimum wage policy was implemented.” In this way, they can compare what might have happened in an economy like Seattle’s had the wage not increased. (The UW study used a Synthetic Seattle, too, but their synthetic model was restricted to Washington State only, and for technical reasons it couldn’t incorporate businesses with more than one location — a critical flaw considering how many large employers like McDonald’s, Subway, and Starbucks pay minimum wage. The Berkeley study incorporates high-volume, low-wage employers into its model.)

So, what did the Berkeley team discover?

Our results show that wages in food services did increase — indicating the policy achieved its goal — and our estimates of the wage increases are in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies. Wages increased much less among full-service restaurants, indicating that employers made use of the tip credit component of the law. Employment in food service, however, was not affected, even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding.

Let’s look at those findings, step-by-step.

1. First of all, wages in Seattle food service increased. This is a no-brainer — when you raise wages, wages will be raised — but it’s important to state the obvious.

2. Full-service restaurant employers can apply a temporary tip credit to wages, effectively allowing customers to subsidize wages for a limited time. (This tip credit will go away when the law is in full effect in 2021.) Those tipped workers, obviously, are seeing less of an increase than others.

3. The minimum wage didn’t lower employment — not even at Subways and McDonald’s, which we were warned were especially vulnerable to a minimum wage increase.

4. In fact, the Berkeley study found that “wages increase[d] substantially more in limited service restaurants than in the overall food service industry.” Subways and other fast-food chains were paying so little that when the minimum wage went up, they had to increase wages by a lot in comparison to full-service restaurants in the area.

5. And yet, when those limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s raised their wages, they didn’t stop hiring. They didn’t lay employees off or close locations. They paid the higher wages and business continued as usual. “The evidence collected here,” the Berkeley researchers conclude, “suggests that minimum wages in Seattle up to $13 per hour raised wages for low-paid workers without causing disemployment.”