Increasing Unemployment and Changing Labor Market Expectations among Black Male Teenagers
聚焦黑人青少年失业率长期高于白人的现象，检验“预期上升假说”，通过模型间接评估黑人青少年对工资和工作条件预期上升是否导致其就业竞争力下降。
For over twenty-five years there has been a secular divergence in the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers. Although the list of factors which may have contributed to the widening gap in the labor market experiences of black and white teenagers is quite long, there seems no reason, a priori, to believe that any one factor has operated in isolation, or with equal force, over the entire period. Suggested causes most frequently cited are: 1) differential growth rates in the black and white teenage populations; 2) an increasing difference in the employability characteristics of black and white teenagers, with black teenagers evidencing a decline in relative employability possibly due to widespread inadequacies in the quality of inner-city public schools; 3) employment decreasing effects of the minimum wage (although these should be race neutral in the absence of differences in employability or an employer preference for white over black youth); 4) an increase in labor market discrimination against black teenagers; 5) expectations among black teenagers with respect to wages and working conditions that have increased more than their attractiveness to employers; 6) increased competition for entry level jobs from other demographic groups (for example, adult white females); 7) the movement of industry out of central cities, reducing the number of entry level jobs available to residents left behind, for many of whom transportation to outlying areas is unavailable. Of the many factors cited, two (increased discrimination and increased expectations) have been the subjects of comparatively little empirical work to assess their relative importance. This is due not so much, I believe, to an inherent lack of interest on the part of researchers, but rather to the fact that, on the one hand, discrimination in the labor market is believed to have lessened considerably, and, on the other, the increased expectations hypothesis appears not to be readily amenable to quantitative empirical examination. The focus here is on the increased expectations hypothesis. In this paper I construct and present the results of estimating a model which I think gives us an indirect test of one dimension of the increased expectations hypothesis. Section I contains the conceptual discussion and model. Estimation results and some qualifications to these results are discussed in Section II.