We Just Created More Than 1,000 Synthetic Controls To Study California's $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage

Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, Jonathan Meer and Joshua D. Nguyen

No 35931, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Synthetic control methods hold the promise of identifying a credible counterfactual by closely reproducing pretreatment outcome paths. Their reliability, however, depends in part on how effectively they constrain researchers’ less-visible degrees of freedom. We explore these methods’ sensitivity by constructing 1440 plausibly defensible specifications to estimate the employment effect of California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage. While over 96 percent of the estimated employment effects are negative, the range is vast, illustrating that synthetic control methods are sensitive to specification choice. Estimates from simpler and far more transparent difference-in-differences methods lie near the centers of the comparable distributions of synthetic control estimates.

JEL-codes: C10 J23 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
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