The impact of minimum wage on youth and teenage employment in Greece

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which minimum wages influence teenage and youth employment in Greece. More specifically, it focuses on the estimation of the proportional change on teenage and youth employment, caused by the minimum wages using modern time series techniques. The coefficients are derived with different model specifications (linear and logarithmic) and are compared with coefficients found in other countries. Further-more, this study presents a sufficient highlight of theoretical issues and an analysis of the result of the different effects of minimum wage changes on the two groups of young employees. As it was observed for youths, a minimum wage increase has a negative impact on employment, while for teenagers the impact is positive in most of the specifications.