Overall teen employment is very, very slightly affected by a minimum wage, after adjusting for spatial and temporal inhomogeneity. At least that's the consensus

Overall teen employment is very, very slightly affected by a minimum wage, after adjusting for spatial and temporal inhomogeneity. At least that's the consensus from most recent articles I've seen on the topic. The consensus is less conclusive on specific effects on minority groups. I've seen at least one paper showing short-term unemployment increase in minority groups. I've also seen at least one paper showing increased employment/earnings in younger, more affluent teens. Some of the recent well-cited studies: http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/166-08.pdf http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/166-08.pdf (2011) Looking at 1990-2009 CPS data: "Including controls for long-term growth differences among states and for heterogeneous economic shocks renders the employment and hours elasticities indistinguishable from zero and rules out any but very small disemployment effects. Dynamic evidence further shows the nature of bias in traditional estimates, and it also rules out all but very small negative long-run effects." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00723.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.... (2009) "A 10 per cent increase in the minimum wage reduces employment by about 0.10 per cent (see column 4 of Table 3). But even if this adverse employment effect were true, it would be of no practical relevance. An elasticity of −0.01 has no meaningful policy implications. If correct, the minimum wage could be doubled and cause only a 1 per cent decrease in teenage employment."