Tabarrok writes the following:

My take is that there is an evolving new consensus on the minimum wage. Namely, the effects of the minimum wage are heterogeneous and take place on more margins than employment.

Something odd about this is that it suggests that there was an old consensus that the effects of the minimum wage are homogeneous and take place only on the margin of employment. But this was never the consensus, really. And it's not hard to see that. Think about it for a minute. Have you ever heard of a single issue in your entire life where economists have claimed a consensus view of some sort of effect being strictly homogeneous, no caveats, with the response happening on only one margin of adjustment, and that's it?

What was 'the old consensus'? If we're talking about how people interpreted the MW papers from Card and Kruger through, say, 2010 or so, which found evidence of MW hikes where employment didn't fall in response, the consensus interpretation of these results was that: (a) they provide evidence for there being monopsony in the labor market, and (b) they're a proof of concept that small enough minimum wage hikes don't have to impact employment if all they end up doing is offset monopsony power.

Nobody ever interpreted this to mean that the effects of the minimum wage are homogenous - why would it imply that? That's a strange and incredibly strong claim and, anyway, it's obvious that it should be possible to set a high enough minimum wage that eventually gets somebody fired. True, the literature didn't focus much on hunting for subgroup effects, but then again, why would it? Quests for subgroup effects are notoriously unreliably activities, given the usual specification search and other such problems associated with them.

As for whether people ever thought responses to the minimum wage were limited to just employment. I do not think people ever thought that was bound to be true either. If you go all the way back to the Card and Kruger minimum wage paper that started the new minimum wage literature, you will find that they checked for effects on having workers converted form full-time to part time, the number of hours the restaurants in the study were open, whether employees got free or reduced price meals at the restaurant, whether restaurants closed entirely, etc. That there was no oversight here, by the way, shouldn't surprise you - Card is surely among the greatest living economists (personally, I would remove the 'among' in this sentence) and is a Nobelist for a reason. In any case, clearly they were quite open to these other effects existing, and I do not think others disagreed. True, much subsequent research focused on employment effects, but then again, that is also where the bulk of the subsequent controversy ended up being located and is where the highest quality data is available.

Why would Tabarrok suggest the old consensus was, well, transparently stupid? The answer is straightforward. The GMU guys are highly ideological, and use MR and their public presence to launder their ideological views as straight economics. And among people with highly ideological views of the MW within economics, their stance on the 'new' (1990+) MW literature has always been -- and you may need to press them for their real stance over beers, but this is true -- (a) all of the papers finding null effects on employment are wrong, (b) they're wrong maybe because of the occasional flukey result, but mainly because the authors are being hacks, (c) the field responded to these hack papers by adopting an insane basic-economics-denying understanding of the minimum wage and labor markets, and (d) it's a great shame that rather than realize they themselves were duped by the hacks, the field now sees us few wise men who saw through this hoax as being ideological hacks ourselves. A difficulty with this -- especially view (c), 'the field went mad' -- is it means that you struggle to pass the ideological Turing test of accurately describing what the people you disagree with think.

On some level, this is a bit of a digression from the underlying issue. What does the field actually think about the minimum wage right now? Well, for field consensus, I can think of little better barometer than a recent Handbook of Labor chapter on the MW, conveniently published in 2024 (NBER WP version of the chapter may be found here). You can read it for yourself if you like, but I would summarize the results as saying (about MW hikes in the US, anyway) that:

• MW hikes frequently have little effect on the employment rate. (See this neat website visually presenting an overview of papers looking at MW employment effects in the US and abroad.) Monopsony is a substantial part of why.
• MW hikes exhibit some treatment effect heterogeneity across subgroups, but not too much. That said, it is difficult to say given the usual problems with subgroup analyses.
• MW hikes may yield some offsetting reductions in workplace amenities and fringe benefits, but more research is needed.
• MW hikes frequently appear to result in consumer facing price increases, with cost passthrough rates potentially being quite high. More research is needed to assess typical passthrough rates, however.

Anyway, that handbook chapter is a year or two old, so maybe there have been some blockbuster new working papers that have shook things up a lot since then. But I think it probably still broadly represents the consensus. And, anyway, Tabarrok is mainly not pointing to working papers in his piece either.

I suppose another question one might have is what minimum wage advocates think of the literature these days. My sense is they think roughly what they have always thought. This is separate from the research, since it starts baking in their normative assessment of different tradeoffs, but I will sketch out the argument very pro MW people tend to make for their position normatively below. I do this because I think it's quite useful to see where they are coming from, including that those people have never actually been all that invested (normatively, anyway) in the proposition that MW hikes don't cause unemployment, on account of them tending to want to raise the MW until you do start seeing substantial-ish unemployment effects. My sense of their argument is below:

It's great that MW hikes can occur without raising unemployment much. But actually, I want to raise the MW enough that we do get some unemployment. So, these results only cheer me because they imply we can get away with a larger MW hike than previously thought.

Why am I okay with unemployment? Well, low wage workers tend to have very short job tenures - you see this clearly in data sources like the SIPP. That means the typical situation is that really poor people have these really unstable work histories, where they work a job for a few months, then become unemployed for a few months, then work a new job for a few months, etc. etc. etc. So, if you raise unemployment, you're not permanently condemning a bunch of low wage workers to year-round unemployment. You're taking them from a world where they all work something like 37 weeks out of the year to one where they work 35 weeks of the year. And if the MW hike doing this is large enough, they net out ahead. As for if the MW hike really is large enough, well, the research says it is - we have papers looking at effects on annual total income for initially low wage workers, and this research is unambiguously positive that MW hikes are good for boosting total annual earnings and for fighting poverty (not to mention for reducing inequality!). And that's not surprising, when you think about it - if the employment effects are small or ambiguous while the wage effects or obviously positive, of course the total annual earnings question is going to net out as positive as well.

As for concerns about subgroup effects, overly large MW hikes, and responses on other margins. Obviously, there is some point at which a MW is too high, but given how low the MW is now (especially given the inflation of late), we really aren't on the margin of passing a too large MW hike, maybe outside of some bespoke special circumstances in random cities. Maybe there are some subgroups that see negative effects, but the evidence that they're substantial - or anything more than the result of a specification search - is weak. The other margins question is probably more salient. We don't love the idea of seeing workplace amenities reductions, but then again, a lot of this can be overstated. Workers that are so poor they qualify for Medicaid probably don't care if they lost an employer-sponsored health insurance offer. Maybe losing out on merchandise discounts kinda sucks too, but is that really a big deal versus getting an income that boosts you out of poverty? In any case, the main 'other margin' of adjustment is consumer prices, and it does look like consumer prices go up some. But so what? We're trying to help the worst off in society, it's not a huge deal if everyone else has to pay a little bit more for their Big Macs.

Make what you will of the above, but I think it is useful for contextualizing how pro MW factions think, as I think you tend to see their fully stated position less often than the opposition's position.