The Effects of Minimum Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income

Using a Dynamic Document, we demonstrate an application of the OPA principles using the 2014 U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) policy report on “The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income”. This report was cited by key stakeholders across the political spectrum, with disagreements around the inputs used, the modeling choince and the way output was interpreted.

In this project, we reverse-engineered CBO’s report and developed a Dynamic Document that describes the methodology in full, and embeds the code with the corresponding narrative. The document also suggests one simple output for policy makers to use as the key representation of the facts, and provides all the materials to reproduce the analysis with a minimal effort from its original sources in a GitHub Repository.

Note that this is an independent pilot project that has not officially been endorsed by the CBO. See also Hoces de la Guardia (2017) for a detailed description of this exercise.