Blogging has been light lately in part because I've been on the road a lot (MVEA meetings in St. Louis this past weekend, Liberty Fund in Indianapolis Thursday and Friday of this week) and in part because of hyperlinking problems with Firefox and Safari. According to www.al.com, teen pregnancy increased in Alabama in 2007 (http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2008/10/teen_pregnancies_up_in_alabama.html). This suggests a testable hypothesis. Minimum wages cause unemployment, and state-level variation in minimum wages would allow one to isolate the effect of a minimum wage on teen pregnancy. Here's a back-of-the-envelope theory explaining why higher teen pregnancy might be an unintended consequence of a higher minimum wage:

Idle hands are the devil's tools, and minimum-wage induced reductions in employment opportunities for teenagers will reduce the opportunity cost of casual sex. In addition, lower incomes means that demand for contraceptives will fall if they are normal goods. More sex coupled with greater risk tolerance should lead to more teen pregnancy. I stress that I haven't tested this theory, nor do I know whether anyone has. If anyone knows whether such a study has been done, I would be interested in seeing the results.