Although wages of low-wage workers increase with increases in the minimum wage, their hours and employment decline, and the combined effect of these changes is a decline in earned income: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7519

US black workers age 16-24 have an unemployment rate of 24.7%, compared to all workers 16-24 with a rate of 11.2% [Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm]. Raising the minimum wage may increase black youth unemployment much more than overall unemployment.

Black and hispanic teens in a central city are more likely to become idle (unemployed and out of school) as a result of a minimum wage increase. http://www.radicalmath.org/docs/MinimumWageProblem.pdf

Exposure to minimum wages at young ages may lead to adverse longer-run effects: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10656

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is more beneficial for poor families than is the minimum wage: http://www.nber.net/papers/w7599

"Why do Americans Work so Hard?" by Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, NBER Macro Annual 2005. This paper examines why Americans work much longer hours than their counterparts in Western Europe. They argue that the two dominant explanations for the divergence in working hours since the 1970s – that Americans are incentivised by paying less tax and that Europeans simply have a different culture – are inadequate on their own. Instead, they present evidence to suggest that Europeans today work much less than Americans because of labour market regulations advocated by unions in the 1970s, 1980s and part of the 1990s. They concede that marginal tax rates have played a role, especially for women’s labour force participation, but conclude that without unions and with limited regulation, tax increases alone do not account for the difference.

A higher minimum wage may discourage employers from using the very low-wage, low-skill workers that minimum wages are intended to help. Also a higher minimum wage may hurt poor and low-inocme familes rather than help them, if the disemployment effects are concentrated among workers in low-income famies. And a higher minimum wage may reduce training, schooling, and work experience - all of which are important sources of higher wages - and hence make it harder for workers to attain the higher-wage jobs that may be the best means to an acceptable level of family income. :http://showmeinstitute.org/smi_study_2.pdf

Minimum wage workers tend to be young. About half of all hourly-paid workers earning $5.15 or less were under age 25, and about one-fourth were age 16-19. Among teenagers, about 9 percent earned $5.15 or less. About 2 percent of workers age 25 and over earned the minimum wage or less. Among those age 65 and over, the proportion was 4 percent. Part-time workers (persons who usually work less than 35 hours per week) were much more likely than their full-time counterparts to be paid $5.15 or less (about 7 percent versus 1 percent). The proportion of hourly-paid workers earning the prevailing Federal minimum wage or less has trended downward since 1980 (1980: 15.1% / 7.7 million workers, 2004: 2.7% / 2 million workers) http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2004.htm

Between 1998 and 2003 — a time when the federal minimum wage did not rise — the median minimum wage worker earned a 10% raise within a year of starting work. During this period, over two-thirds of workers starting out at the minimum wage earned more than the minimum a year later. Minimum wage jobs are often entry-level, 40% of minimum wage workers did not have a job the year before. http://www.epionline.org/studies/macpherson_06-2004.pdf