The mystery of high unemployment rates for black Americans

By THE DATA TEAM

IT IS well known among labour-market wonks that black Americans are less likely to be employed than members of other racial groups. The unemployment rate for blacks sits at 7.1%, compared with 3.8% for whites. What is not known, however, is why. One straightforward cause would be lower levels of education: only 23% of African-American adults have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 36% of whites. However, a recent paper by Tomaz Cajner, Tyler Radler, David Ratner and Ivan Vidangos, a group of economists at the Federal Reserve, finds that differences between races in schooling alone are not nearly large enough to account for the size of the disparity.