1,440 Synthetic Control Specs Show Huge Leeway in California $20 Minimum Wage Studies
RexDouglass · x · 2026-11-12
A working paper by Jeffrey Clemens (UC San Diego/NBER) and Texas A&M's Olivia Edwards, Jonathan Meer, and Joshua Nguyen (I4R DP No. 347) probes the sensitivity of synthetic control methods using California's $20 fast-food minimum wage as a test case.
- The authors construct 1,440 plausibly defensible specifications to estimate the policy's employment effect
- Over 96% of estimated employment effects are negative, yet the range is vast — revealing how sensitive results are to researchers' less-visible degrees of freedom
- Simpler, more transparent difference-in-differences estimates land near the center of the synthetic control distributions
The paper's core point is methodological: synthetic control's credibility hinges on constraining researcher discretion, and in practice its leeway is enormous.
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