Back in the day, the minimum wage got a bad rap. Until a few decade ago, economists generally believed that if you increased the minimum wage, companies wouldn't hire as many workers. Since then, economists have been carefully studying what happens after individual states increase their own minimum wages — providing useful, if imperfect, experiments.

Arindrajit Dube is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He joined us to talk about studies on the minimum wage, including some of his own, examining the effects from minimum wage increases on the labor market.

And the story is more complicated and multifaceted than many people realize.

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