They said Seattle’s minimum wage would cost workers; so did it?

A research team including economists from the University of Washington has put out a paper showing that Seattle’s recent minimum-wage increases brought benefits to many workers employed at the time, while leaving few employed workers worse off.on their own, these results appear unremarkable. Large stacks of academic papers have shown that, for the average worker, a minimum-wage increase does more good in raising pay than it hurts by prompting some employers to cut back on hiring or hours.

But this new paper has a unique pedigree: Last summer, the same authors released a paper showing that Seattle’s minimum-wage increases had large costs for workers. Because employers reduced hours in response to the city’s rising minimum wage in 2016, the researchers found, average pay fell by an eye-popping $125 a month, or about 6.6 percent. (They did not observe such effects for a minimum-wage increase the year before.)

The earlier paper created an immediate political sensation, not least because the researchers had access to highly detailed data on worker wages and hours — the kind of information generally not available to the authors of other studies.

Conservative politicians and news outlets quickly hailed the findings. “So often, liberal policies, born of good intentions to ‘help the poor,’ end up hurting them,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, said on Twitter.

Liberals, for their part, gnashed their teeth over the result, pointing out a variety of methodological flaws that could have skewed it.

In light of the new paper, do commentators on both sides suddenly have to reassess?