Replication files for David Slichter, "The Employment Effects of the Minimum Wage: A Selection Ratio Approach to Measuring Treatment Effects,” Journal of Applied Econometrics

Firstly, I’ve provided a .do file called sr.do which contains general code for implementing the selection ratio approach, with detailed instructions written as comments in the code.

For the minimum wage application, the main data file is mw_final.dta. A .csv version is also provided. Observations are a county in a time period. I have added self-explanatory variable labels for most variables. A few variables warrant a clearer explanation:

adj1-adj14: List of FIPS codes of all counties which are adjacent to the county in question. Each variables holds one adjacent county, and counties with fewer than 14 neighbors will have missing values for some of these variables.

change, logchange: Minimum wage this quarter - minimum wage last quarter, measured either in dollars or in logs.

time, t1-t108: The variable "time" converts years and quarters into a univariate time period, with time=1 in 1990Q1 and time=108 in 2016Q4. t1-t108 are indicators for each of these time periods.

lnemp_1418, lnearnbeg_1418, lnsep_1418, lnhira_1418, lnchurn_1418: Logs of employment, earnings, separations, hires, and churn, respectively, for 14-18 year olds.

gt1-gt6: Dummies for inclusion in each of the six comparisons used for the main (i.e., not spillover-robust) analysis. All treated counties which neighbor a control country take value 1 for each of these variables; all other treated counties take value 0. Among control counties, gt1=1 if the county neighbors a treated county and 0 otherwise, gt2=1 if the county has gt1=0 but neighbors a gt1=1 county, gt3=1 if county has gt1=gt2=0 but neighbors a gt2=1 county, etc.

h2-h6: Dummies for inclusion in each of the first spillover-robust (i.e., excluding border counties only) comparisons. Among control counties, h2-h6 are equal to gt2-gt6. Among treated counties, h2-h6 are equal to 1 if the treated county has gt1=0 but borders a gt1=1 county, and 0 otherwise.

k3-k6: Dummies for inclusion in each of the second spillover-robust (i.e., excluding two layers) comparisons. Among control counties, these variables are equal to gt3-gt6. Among treated counties, all observations take value 1 except those with gt1=1 or h2=1.

The data sources are as follows. The minimum wage law series is taken from David Neumark's website (https://www.economics.uci.edu/~dneumark/datasets.html). The economic variables are taken from the QWI, which I accessed via the Ithaca Virtual RDC. County adjacency files were downloaded from the Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/county-adjacency.html).

The file main_withgraphs.do then runs the analyses and produces estimates and graphs. The resulting output file containing results is results.dta.

For the incumbency application, the main data file is incumb_final.dta. A .csv version is also provided. This file is drawn from Caughey and Sekhon's (2011) data; see their description of most variables here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8EYYA2

The key added variables are _IDistancea1-_IDistancea50, which are dummies for inclusion in the 50 comparisons used in the paper. Treated observations (i.e., Democratic wins) with margin of victory below 5 points have each of these variables equal to 1. Control observations have these variables equal to 1 if they fall within the margin of victory range, e.g., _IDistancea9=1 for control observations with Republican margin of victory between 8 and 9 points. Note that these variables are redefined by the code for the analyses of treatment effects away from the discontinuity. Lastly, there is a variable called RepWin which is the treatment variable when treatment is defined as a Republican winning.

The file sr_incumb.do then performs the analysis.

Please contact me with any questions at slichter@binghamton.edu.