Labor Economics: Problems in Analyzing Labor Markets, 1993
Recent Economic Thought Series, Vol. 29

William Darity, Jr. In 1984 the Kluwer series in Modern Economic Thought, under the editorial direction of Warren Samuels, brought out a book under my editorship entitled Labor Economics: Modern Views. It consisted of a series of essays and commentaries that sought, in a critical fashion, to assess the state of the art in the field of labor economics with respect to several themes. These included methodology versus practice, the analysis of discrimination by gender and race, the phenomenon of persistent racial differences in un­ employment exposure, occupational safety and health regulation, dual versus segmented labor markets, and the remnants of the Phillips curve trade-off between unemployment and inflation. Nearly a decade later I was approached by Warren Samuels and Kluwer about editing a new book that would again address where things stand in labor economics. In proceeding with the development of this current book I was a struck by the extent to which the research thrust that was apparent in the early 1980s remains intact as we move toward the 21st century. The vast majority of scholarship in the labor subfield is dominated by the methodological orientation of applied neoclassical microeconomics, supplemented by incursions from the themes that occupy the so-called "pure theorists," particularly of the game theoretic variety.

Introduction. I: Unemployment. 1. Keynes, Cambridge, and the New Keynesian Economics; M.S. Lawlor. 2. Labor Economics and Unemployment: An Historian's Perspective; A. Keyssar. II: How Labor Markets Really Work. 3. The Impact of Formal On-the-Job Training on Unemployment and the Influence of Gender, Race, and Working Life Cycle Position on Accessibility to On-the-Job Training; A.J. Field, A.H. Goldsmith. 4. Empirical Tests of Labor Market Equilibrium: An Evaluation; J. Heckman, T. MaCurdy. 5. Labor Market Segmentation Theory: Reconsidering the Evidence; W.T. Dickens, K. Lang. III: Race, Discrimination and Competition. 6. Labor Markets and Racial Inequality; J. Cotton. 7. Racial Inequality and Racial Conflict: Recent Developments in Radical Theory; R. Williams. IV: Culture, Ethnicity and Poverty. 8. Culture and Human Capital: Theory and Evidence or Theory Versus Evidence; S.A. Woodbury. 9. Labor Economics and Public Policy: Dominance of Constraints on Preferences; M. Foster. Index.