The obvious starting position is that raising minimum wages has a negative effect on the number of low wage employees hired; because the money from higher wages has to come from somewhere and might not be available - leading to reduced business activity. This is also the classic economics position. With that in mind, there is going to be a bias towards publishing the 'surprising' results that there is no impact/a positive impact from minimum wages. The bias that this paper is identifying is surely a real thing, but it might potentially be a bais against, eg, poorly run studies that pick up spurious effects.
So the conclusions the paper draws w.r.t. elasticity aren't that interesting; we'd need to know why the bias exists before it is particularly useful. I'm a bit suspicious of using 'meta-analysis' at all because that just means that the faction that repeats themselves the most with low-quality research gets to pick what the elasticity is.
In theory we shouldn't need 200 studies to make a claim, we should need 1 or maybe a small suite (like, 5) of very high quality studies that intellectually honest economists struggle to rebut.
So the conclusions the paper draws w.r.t. elasticity aren't that interesting; we'd need to know why the bias exists before it is particularly useful. I'm a bit suspicious of using 'meta-analysis' at all because that just means that the faction that repeats themselves the most with low-quality research gets to pick what the elasticity is.
In theory we shouldn't need 200 studies to make a claim, we should need 1 or maybe a small suite (like, 5) of very high quality studies that intellectually honest economists struggle to rebut.