Позитивные изменения. Том 1, №1 (2021). Positive changes. Volume 1, Issue 1 (2021)

One of the urgent tasks of the current time is assessing the social impact of modern business. Impact business should certainly be successful in two areas — in the economy as well as in its social mission implementation.

The one who wants to do such assessment always faces a difficult task — to choose the right method and to base it on reliable data, which still needs to be identified and collected correctly in the process of Impact-influence.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics winners, David Card, Hido Imbens and Joshua Angrist — three scientists from American universities — took an important step in this direction, showing to the world the ways to draw scientific conclusions based on seemingly unscientific experiments. This methodology can be used to evaluate complex social processes and to obtain, as the authors have shown, reliable results.

The complexity of organizing a controlled experiment is the main issue of social processes research. It is not possible to make a strict selection of people suitable for the experiment and to subject them to purposeful influence, for example, to put them to a healthy diet. We can only evaluate those whose conscious choice led them to such a diet. But what factors influenced the choice of those people? Can we fully correlate them with those who have not made such a choice? And what is our influence on such a choice if we regularly promote a healthy lifestyle? This is where the methodology for evaluating the results of natural experiments created by the Nobel award winners will help us. Scientists were able to introduce a scientific evidence base into experiments set by the life itself. If in one city or one country the minimum wage is suddenly raised, the working week is reduced or the hiring of migrants is expanded, and in neighboring countries they are not, then by measuring the results it will be possible to tell how this affects the well-being of people and the society as a whole. In other words, scientists suggested looking for two different groups of people, one of which has been randomly impacted by a social factor, and the second group avoided this impact.

David Card, using the method of natural experiments, analyzed the impact of the minimum wage, the level of immigration and education on the labor market trends. He found that raising the minimum wage does not always lead to a reduction in the number of jobs, and the secondary education has a higher value than it had been thought previously. In his research, Card showed that if basic models of economic theory are perceived as dogma and not tested empirically can lead to incorrect conclusions. Theoretically it is assumed that an employee's salary in the market is equal to his maximum productivity: on one hand, an organization can no longer pay an employee, focusing the cost limits, on the other hand, an employee will not agree to work for less and will move to another employer. Hence, any attempts of the state to set the minimum wage above the market are destructive. This paradigm is often used by those who are against raising the minimum wage.

If in one city or one country the minimum wage is suddenly raised, the working week is reduced or the hiring of migrants is expanded, and in neighboring countries they are not, then by measuring the results it will be possible to tell how this affects the well-being of people and the society as a whole