Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Oops!   [Mark Krikorian]

Remember how in the mid-90s the Democrats in Congress (and their auxiliaries in the media) seized on a single study by Princeton economist David Card which "proved" that increasing the statutory minimum wage did not, in fact, reduce employment? Ted Kennedy repeatedly cited the report as a justification for the minimum wage increase he was pushing in 1996.

Well, there's a new example of the same kind of thing in immigration. A paper a couple years ago by two economists, Ottaviano and Peri, supposedly demonstrated that immigration actually raises the wages of many native-born workers. This one paper was quickly seized upon by open-borders pundits as proof that everything else written about immigration's economic effects was wrong. Virginia Postrel hyped it at the New York Times, with Tyler Cowen taking the L.A. Times. It's been cited by the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and in various congressional hearing presentations by the Hudson Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Ben Johnson and Dan Siciliano of the immigration lawyers' lobby, and a representative of Ingersoll-Rand, plus many newspaper citations.

And it turns out to have been a mirage. Borjas reports that he'd been trying to figure out for some time how they arrived at their numbers, and finally has: apparently, the study's conclusions only hold up because the authors counted currently enrolled high-school juniors and seniors as "dropouts."

Moral of the story: If new research supports your preferred policy positions by overturning everything else known about the subject, see if someone else can reproduce the results first.

03/11 08:21 AMShare