Then economists began analyzing what actually happened when the minimum wage was raised. Since the early 1990s, economists have conducted dozens of studies of more than 500 minimum-wage increases across the country. “The bulk of the studies conducted in the last 30 years suggest the effect of minimum wages on jobs is quite modest,” Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has conducted multiple meta-analyses of the minimum-wage literature, told me. “Sometimes they actually result in higher employment.”