the minimum wage on teenage unemployment, or its relative impact on black and white teenagers. The purpose of this paper … unemployment rates of teenagers, we explore several related issues: the relative importance of changing the level and coverage of …

-employment probability. Living in an area with high local unemployment reduces re-employment chances as does being in a long spell of non …-employment. However, when we allow for an interaction between the length of time of a jobless spell and the local unemployment rate we … find the interaction term is positive. In other words, while workers appear to be scarred by a long spell of unemployment …

, leading in turn to higher, not lower, unemployment. And, even if unemployment comes down, workers may actually be worse off …, going through many spells of unemployment and fixed duration jobs, before obtaining a regular job. Looking at French data … substantial reduction in unemployment duration. If anything, their effect on welfare of young workers appears to have been …