TY - JOUR AU - Fryer,Roland G., Jr AU - Kahn,Lisa AU - Levitt,Steven D. AU - Spenkuch,Jörg L. TI - The Plight of Mixed Race Adolescents JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14192 PY - 2008 Y2 - July 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14192 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14192.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Roland G. Fryer, Jr Department of Economics Harvard University Littauer Center 208 Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-9592 Fax: 617/495-8570 E-Mail: rfryer@fas.harvard.edu Lisa Kahn Yale School of Management 135 Prospect St PO Box 208200 New Haven, CT 06520 Tel: 617-613-1228 E-Mail: lisa.kahn@yale.edu Steven D. Levitt Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773/834-1862 Fax: 773/702-8490 E-Mail: slevitt@midway.uchicago.edu Jorg L. Spenkuch Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 E-Mail: jspenkuch@uchicago.edu AB - Over the past 40 years the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single-race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the plight of mixed race individuals during their adolescence and early adulthood. As one might expect, on a host of background and achievement characteristics, mixed race adolescents fall in between whites and blacks. When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. We argue that these behavioral patterns are most consistent with the "marginal man" hypothesis, which we formalize as a two-sector Roy model. Mixed race adolescents -- not having a natural peer group -- need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted. All other models we considered can explain neither why mixed race adolescents are outliers on risky behaviors nor why these behaviors are not strongly influenced by the racial composition at their school. ER -