ABSTRACT
The federal government passed an array of programs in the 1960's to address labor market inequities such as discrimination. One of the first pieces of legislation to deal with wage discrimination by sex was The Equal Pay Act of 1963, an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Four primary approaches to the economics of discrimination are: neoclassical theory with an emphasis on the human capital paradigm; statistical discrimination; segmented labor market analysis, which is also known as the dual labor market hypothesis; and Marxist analysis. Given the preeminence of theoretical and empirical work in neoclassical economics, the authors adopt the neoclassical approach for analyzing wage discrimination in this book. Another source of potential labor market discrimination against workers is occupational segregation. It is reasonable to anticipate that, in the absence of discrimination, the occupational distributions of workers are based on the productivity distributions of these groups.
