Abstract
This paper uses the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Labor Market Experience to examine whether, as Freeman has contended, wage differentials based on race have largely vanished from the labor market for young men. The evidence indicates that there is still a significant black-white difference in hourly wage rates among young men not enrolled in school, but not among students. Hispanic-white wage differences are not significant among either students or nonstudents. The author also shows that longer job tenure contributes to significantly higher wage rates among white nonstudents, but not among black nonstudents, and the wage premium of whites over blacks among nonstudents increases substantially when sample-selection bias is taken into account.
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