This paper examines the effects of minimum wage changes on earnings and employment in restaurants and other low-wage sectors across state borders in the United States. The authors use policy discontinuities at state borders to identify these effects, comparing contiguous county pairs that straddle a state border. They find no adverse employment effects and show that traditional approaches that do not account for local economic conditions tend to produce spurious negative effects due to spatial heterogeneities in employment trends unrelated to minimum wage policies. The findings are robust to allowing for long-term effects of minimum wage changes. The study advances the literature by providing improved estimates of minimum wage effects, reconciling conflicting findings, and addressing the issue of omitted variables bias in national-level estimates. The results suggest that minimum wage increases significantly raise total earnings at these jobs, contrary to the implications of traditional fixed-effects estimates.This paper examines the effects of minimum wage changes on earnings and employment in restaurants and other low-wage sectors across state borders in the United States. The authors use policy discontinuities at state borders to identify these effects, comparing contiguous county pairs that straddle a state border. They find no adverse employment effects and show that traditional approaches that do not account for local economic conditions tend to produce spurious negative effects due to spatial heterogeneities in employment trends unrelated to minimum wage policies. The findings are robust to allowing for long-term effects of minimum wage changes. The study advances the literature by providing improved estimates of minimum wage effects, reconciling conflicting findings, and addressing the issue of omitted variables bias in national-level estimates. The results suggest that minimum wage increases significantly raise total earnings at these jobs, contrary to the implications of traditional fixed-effects estimates.