twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, almost irregardless of the level of overall economic activity. Among the various explanations given for the black-white unemployment rate differential are racial discrimination, differences in the level of educational attainment, differences in the quality of education, differences in the minimum wage acceptable for employment, and differences in job search patterns and job retention. Using data for a low unemployment period (1969-70), my analysis indicates that among inner-city residents of New York City a racial disparity existed in unemployment experience and that while factors such as schooling, age, previous training, and other demographic characteristics mattered, they accounted for less than twofifths of the variations in unemployment experience. My results also indicate that the distinction between the number of spells of unemployment and the length of unemployment is an important one, and that the experience of blacks and whites differ substantially by either measure.

Numerous studies have emerged over the past decade dealing with the employment effects of minimum wage legislation (for example, see Jacob Mincer and Edward Gramlich). These studies uniformly show that some amount of disemployment results from the imposition of a minimum wage above a wage that would prevail in the absence of such legislation; though there is considerable dispute concerning the magnitude of the effect. In addition, most if not all of the recent studies indicate a greater employment sensitivity to changes in the minimum wage on the part of teenagers, nonwhites, and the low-skilled, generally, than is true for other groups. Job losses due to higher minimum wages may contribute to high unemployment rates among youth in general, and minority youth in particular. This paper presents no direct evidence on the impact of the minimum wage on teenage unemployment. Its results do suggest, however, that previous studies of the impact of the minimum wage on employment loss were probably biased towards overstatement of the effect of the minimum wage. In the case of nonwhite teenagers, the results presented here indicate that over the period 1954 to 1979, cyclical factors affected nonwhite teenage employment to a far greater extent than did changes in the minimum wage.