After California's $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers went into effect in April, some economists expected affected restaurants to cut jobs. So what actually happened? They not only added workers but did so at a faster pace than fast-food restaurants in the nation as a whole—or at least that was the claim of a research paper by two labor economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Davis.

If you actually read it, you'll find that the results celebrated in the press release and echoed by the media aren't in the paper. In fact, it barely addresses the effect of the minimum wage increase on fast-food employment in California. It offers no numbers and no models. There's no evidence that fast-food jobs increased after the law was implemented.

The paper's findings were trumpeted as evidence that government-mandated wage increases have no adverse effect and that we should be raising the minimum wage higher and in more places.

Only toward the end of the 25-page study is employment shown. There you'll find a graph that represents the closest thing to an argument in the paper. It shows full-service and fast-food restaurant employment in California, represented by the red line, and in the U.S., represented by the blue line, from 2023 to 2024.