Moderate increases in the legal minimum wage do not cause significant employment losses among low-wage workers
Weak-link patterns
Brief §8's named failure modes, computed from this claim's own paper roles and status -- not a single weakness score. Patterns B and E aren't implemented yet (need dependency-graph machinery, docs/BASIC_ROADMAP.md Phase 11).
stored status is 'unknown_conflicting'
flagship 'The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs*' (2592 citations) vs 4 contradicting row(s) of 10 total (needs >=3 contradicting)
Open questions
Pattern G. Human-written, never generated -- deliberately no importance or priority score (docs/BASIC_ROADMAP.md's own precedent against inventing one, matching innovation_considerations).
Does the employment effect of a minimum-wage increase depend on local labor-market monopsony power, which would explain why methodologically credible studies reach opposite conclusions?
Motivated by: Pattern C (conflicting evidence) and Pattern F (highly-cited original and successors, repeated contradicting studies on both sides)
Evidence map
Position shows direction, circle area shows citation count. Click a paper for the reason its role was assigned.
Evidence dimensions
Eight independent 0–5 judgments, each with a written rationale. Deliberately never summed into one score.
A large, high-quality, directly-on-point quasi-experimental literature whose strongest studies disagree with each other. Contested evidence, not thin evidence.
Three decades, many independent teams, repeated re-examination of the original episodes and many new ones.
Scored strictly per the same-paradigm definition: the one independent same-paradigm re-examination reversed the result; the confirming Reply was by the original authors. Most confirming work is conceptual and does not count here.
Why this status
The derivation rule, evaluated top to bottom, first match wins. This is the rule itself — not a confidence score standing in for one.
- 1Unknown — unexplored
10 paper rows (needs <3) and evidence_strength=3 (needs <=1); both required
- 2Unknown — conflicting evidencematched
(a) 1 failure vs 1 success rows -> fires; (b) 2 review rows — opposite-verdict test is a human judgment, not a count; (c) 3 conceptual failure vs 2 conceptual success, 1 original -> fires (balanced)
- 3Unknown — underdeterminednot reached
alternative_explanations=2 (needs <=1) AND evidence_strength=3 (needs >=3)
- 4Establishednot reached
independent_replication=1 (>=4), evidence_strength=3 (>=4), consensus=2 (>=4)
- 5Strong, domain-limitednot reached
Recorded rationale
v3 rule 2 - all three clauses fire: (a) 1 independent_replication_failure vs 1 direct_replication_success, balanced with at least one of each (first time clause (a) has fired on real data in any pilot); (b) two review rows with documented opposite verdicts (Belman & Wolfson 2014 vs Neumark & Wascher 2006); (c) three conceptual_replication_failure rows plus an original. Naive citation-only guess was 'established'; divergence material. Pilot 3 (economics, gap-discovery; prior familiarity disclosed HIGH).