Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets.
See Reynolds Farley, Blacks and Whites: Narrowing the Gap? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Reynolds Farley and Walter R. Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk, America Unequal (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995). References to "relative racial wages" refer to the relative difference in black compared to white wages, measured either as a ratio of black to white wages or as a gap between black and white wages.
2.
For foundational work, see Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Michael Reich, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Randy Hodson and Robert L. Kaufman, "Economic Dualism: A Critical Review," American Sociological Review 47, no. 6 (1982): 727-39; Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993); and Barbara Kilbourne, Paula England, and Kurt Beron, "Effects of Individual, Occupational, and Industrial Characteristics of Earnings: Intersections of Race and Gender," Social Forces 72, no. 4 (1994): 1149-76. For subsequent sociological work, see Eric Grodsky and Devah Pager, "The Structure of Disadvantage: Individual and Occupational Determinants of the Black-White Wage Gap," American Sociological Review 66, no. 4 (2001): 542-67; Irene Browne, Cynthia Hewitt, Leann Tigges, and Gary Green, "Why Does Job Segregation Lead to Wage Inequality among African Americans? Person, Place, Sector, or Skills?" Social Science Research 30 (2001): 473-95; Lesley Williams Reid and Beth A. Rubin, "Integrating Economic Dualism and Labor Market Segmentation: The Effects of Race, Gender and Structural Location on Earnings, 1974-2000," Sociological Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2003): 405-32; Matt L. Huffman and Philip N. Cohen, "Racial Wage Inequality: Job Segregation and Devaluation Across U.S. Labor Markets," American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 4 (2004): 902-36; David J. Eggebeen and Daniel T. Lichter, "Race, Family Structure, and Changing Poverty Among American Children," American Sociological Review 56, no. 6 (1991): 801-17; Daniel T. Lichter, "Poverty and Inequality Among Children," Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 121-45; Sara McLanahan and Christine Percheski, "Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalities," Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 257-76; A. Silvia Cancio, T. David Evans, and David J. Maume, Jr., "Reconsidering the Declining Significance of Race: Racial Differences in Early Career Wages," American Sociological Review 61, 4 (1996): 541-56; and Kevin Stainback, Corre L. Robinson, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, "Race and Workplace Integration," American Behavioral Scientist 48, no. 9 (2005): 1200-28.
3.
On the relative dearth of sociological work on earnings inequality, see Martina Morris and Bruce Western, "Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century," Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 623-57; and Kevin T. Leicht, "Broken Down by Race and Gender? Sociological Explanations of New Sources of Earnings Inequality," Annual Review of Sociology 34: 237-55. For examples of the economists’ debate, see David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney, "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Re-Assessing the Revisionists," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 11627, September 2005; and Thomas Lemieux, "What Do We Really Know About Changes in Wage Inequality?" National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2007. Wilson’s classic explanation is to be found in William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Under-class, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1996); for recognition of the influence of Wilson’s explanation, see David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman, "Systems of Gender, Race, and Class Inequality: Multilevel Analyses," Social Forces 78, no. 2 (1999): 433-60; Albert Chevan and Randall Stokes, "Growth in Family Income Inequality, 1970-1990: Industrial Restructuring and Demographic Change," Demography 37, no. 3 (2000): 365-80; Patricia Alice Simpson, "Skills Shifts and Black Male Joblessness in Major Urban Labor Markets over the 1980s," Social Science Research 29 (2000): 327-55; and Lesley Williams Reid, Robert M. Adelman, and Charles Jaret, "Women, Race, and Ethnicity: Exploring Earnings Differentials in Metropolitan America," City & Community 6, no. 2 (2007): 137-56. For examples of the mixed evidence for Wilson’s explanation, which is addressed more fully later in this paper, see John Bound and Harry J. Holzer, "Industrial Shifts, Skill Levels, and the Labor Market for Black and White Males," Review of Economics and Statistics 75, no. 3 (1993): 387-96; David Card and Thomas Lemieux, "Changing Wage Structure and Black-White Wage Differentials," American Economic Review 84, no. 2 (1994): 29-33; and Michael J. Handel, "Skills Mismatch in the Labor Market," Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 135-65.
4.
For an emphasis on education and relative earnings gains, see James P. Smith and Finis Welch, "Race Differences in Earnings: A Survey and New Evidence," in Current Issues in Urban Economics, ed. Peter Mieszkowski and Mahlon Straszheim (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 40-73; James P. Smith, "Race and Human Capital," American Economic Review 74, no. 4 (1984): 685-98; and James P. Smith and Finis R. Welch, "Black Economic Progress after Myrdal," Journal of Economic Literature 27, no. 2 (1989): 519-64. For manufacturing opportunities and black gains, see Frank Levy, The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 3, and Wilson, When Work Disappears, 26-27.
5.
William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Wilson , Truly Disadvantaged; and Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality ( Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 70-74, 95-103. Wacquant’s use of the term "exclusionary closure" appears on 231.
6.
See, for example, Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Linda Brewster Stearns and Charlotte Wilkinson Coleman, "Industrial and Local Labor Market Structures and Black Male Employment in the Manufacturing Sector," Social Science Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1990): 285-98; Ronald F. Ferguson, "Shifting Challenges: Fifty Years of Economic Change Toward Black-White Earnings Inequality," Daedalus 124, no. 1 (1995): 37-76; and William Julius Wilson, "Toward a Framework for Understanding Forces that Contribute to or Reinforce Racial Inequality," Race and Social Problems 1 (2009): 3-11.
7.
For postwar black wage gains, see John J. Donohue III and James Heckman, "Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks," Journal of Economic Literature 29, no. 4 (1991): 1603-43; and Thomas N. Maloney, "Wage Compression and Wage Inequality Between Black and White Males in the United States, 1940-1960," Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (1994): 358-81. For the post-1970s period, see David Card and John E. DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems and Puzzles," Journal of Labor Economics 20, no. 4 (2002): 733-83.
8.
On postwar sectoral employment patterns, see Nelson Lim, "On the Back of Blacks? Immigrants and the Fortunes of African Americans," in Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America, ed. Roger Waldinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 186-227; see also Roger Waldinger, "Strangers at the Gates" in Strangers at the Gates, 1-29, and Roger Waldinger, "Up from Poverty? ‘Race,’ Immigration, and the Fate of Low-Skilled Workers," in Strangers at the Gates, 80-116. For long-term trends in black unemployment, see Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, "The New African American Inequality," Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 75-108. On the importance of government-led practices, see Robert A. Margo, "Explaining Black-White Wage Convergence, 1940-1950," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 48, no. 3 (1995): 470-81; James J. Heckman, "The Impact of Government on the Economic Status of Black Americans," in The Question of Discrimination: Racial Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market, ed. Steven Shulman and William Darity, Jr. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 50-80; and Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, "Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration," American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 2 (2005): 553-78.
9.
We acknowledge that there are various definitional and measurement challenges in constructing a unified macrohistorical picture of racial wage and employment inequality (e.g., studies often differ by data sources, measurement conventions, and sampling frames), but for the most part the following discussion does not address these issues. Generally, we focus on studies that investigate differences in racial wages and earnings, not all income, because we are interested in changing patterns of compensation that result from labor market dynamics. Our discussion of racial differences in unemployment and labor force participation emphasizes (except where noted otherwise) a comprehensive view of "joblessness" that includes both unemployed and discouraged workers, and thus will rely in part on the presentation of employment-to-population ratios.
10.
On migration, see Maloney, "Wage Compression and Wage Inequality," and Levy, New Dollars and Dreams, 15-16, 92-95. For education, see Smith and Welch, "Race Differences in Earnings," and Smith, "Race and Human Capital."
11.
For wage patterns in the 1940s, see Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, "The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century," Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (1992): 1-34; see also Margo, "Explaining Black-White Wage Convergence." On wage patterns into the 1950s, see Maloney, "Wage Compression and Wage Inequality"; see also Goldin and Margo, "Great Compression," and Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980).
On the importance of black migration, along with the movement of black workers out of service jobs, see Maloney, "Wage Compression and Wage Inequality"; Margo, "Explaining Black-White Wage Convergence"; and William J. Collins, "African-American Economic Mobility in the 1940s: A Portrait from the Palmer Survey," Journal of Economic History 60, no. 3 (2000): 756-81; the quote comes from Maloney, "Wage Compression and Wage Inequality," 365. On the strong gains by black women in service jobs, see Martha J. Bailey and William J. Collins, "The Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940s," Journal of Economic History 66, no. 3 (2006): 737-77.
14.
Goldin and Margo, "Great Compression"; Robert A. Margo and T. Aldrich Finegan, "The Great Compression of the 1940s: The Public versus the Private Sector,"Explorations in Economic History39, no. 2 (2002): 183-203.
15.
Sterling Denhard Spero, Government as Employer ( New York: Remsen Press, 1948); Richard B. Freeman, "Spurts in Union Growth: Defining Moments and Social Processes," in The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 265-95; and Margo and Finegan, "Great Compression of the 1940s."
16.
Herbert Garfinkel , When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics of FEPC (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959); Andrew Edmund Kerstein, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-1946 ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); William J. Collins, "Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets,"American Economic Review91, no. 1 ( 2001): 272-86.
17.
On the implementation of FEPC, see Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), and Collins, "Race, Roosevelt and Wartime Production." For war-industry openings, see Maloney, "Wage Compression and Wage Inequality," and Margo and Finegan, "Great Compression of the 1940s."
18.
For earlier assessments of FEPC, see Barton J. Bernstein, "America in War and Peace: A Test of Liberalism," in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Vintage, 1968), 289-321; and Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 72. For a statistical reappraisal, see Collins, "Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production."
19.
William J. Collins , "The Labor Market Impact of State-Level Anti-Discrimination Laws, 1940-1960,"Industrial and Labor Relations Review56, no. 2 (2003): 244-72.
20.
For wartime union growth, see Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 54-59. On new wage standards, see Freeman, "Spurts in Union Growth"; Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 54- 59, 76-85; and L. Frank Weyher and Maurice Zeitlin, "Questioning ‘Supply and Demand’: Unions, Labor Market Processes, and Interracial Inequality," Labor History 46, no. 1 (2005): 19-36.
21.
Margo and Finegan, "Great Compression of the 1940s"; and Philip F. Rubio, "‘There’s Always Work at the Post Office’: African Americans Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality at the United States Post Office, 1940-1971" (PhD diss., Department of History, Duke University, 2006).
Whether or not the decade of the 1940s was truly an economic watershed for black workers becomes more complicated when the earnings data are disaggregated by gender. According to one study, a significant portion of the wage advances enjoyed by black women relative to white women during this decade were also sustained over the 1950s and the decades thereafter; see Bailey and Collins, "Wage Gains of African-American Women." However, for evidence of a different subsequent trajectory, see John Bound and Laura Dresser, "Losing Ground: The Erosion of the Relative Earnings of African American Women during the 1980s," in Latinas and African American Women at Work, ed. Irene Browne (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 61-104; and Becky Pettit and Stephanie Ewert, "Employment Gains and Wage Declines: The Erosion of Black Women’s Relative Wages Since 1980," Demography 46, no. 3 (2009): 469-92.
24.
These data come from Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous vs. Episodic Change," 1607; see also John Bound and Richard B. Freeman, "What Went Wrong? The Erosion of Relative Earnings and Employment among Young Black Men in the 1980s," Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (1992): 201-32.
25.
William J. Carrington, Kristin McCue, and Brooks Pierce, "Black/White Wage Convergence: The Role of Public Sector Wages and Employment," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 49, no. 3 (1996): 456-71; and Augustin Kwasi Fosu, "Occupational Gains of Black Women Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Long-Term or Episodic?" American Economic Review 87, no. 2 (1997): 311-14.
26.
Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous vs. Episodic Change,"1623.
27.
Richard B. Freeman, "Changes in the Labor Market for Black Americans, 1948-1972," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1973): 67-131; Charles Brown, "Black-White Earnings Ratios Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Importance of Labor Market Dropouts," Quarterly Journal of Economics 99, no. 1 (1984): 31-44; John Bound and Richard B. Freeman, "Black Economic Progress: Erosion of the Post-1960s Gains in the 1980s?" in The Question of Discrimination: Racial Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market, ed. Steven Shulman and William Darity, Jr. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 32-49.
28.
For examples of this consensus, see Richard Freeman, "Black Economic Progress since 1964," Public Interest 52 (1978): 52-68; Heckman, "Impact of Government"; Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous vs. Episodic Change"; Wayne Vroman, "Industrial Change and Black Men’s Relative Earnings," Research in Labor Economics 12 (1991): 213-44; David Card and Alan B. Krueger, "Trends in Relative Black-White Earnings Revisited," American Economic Review 83, no. 2 (1993): 85-91; and James J. Heckman, Thomas M. Lyons, and Petra E. Todd, "Understanding Black-White Wage Differentials, 1960-1990," American Economic Review 90, no. 2 (2000): 344-49. For regional trend data, see Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous vs. Episodic Change"; Bound and Freeman, "Black Economic Progress"; and Leah Platt Boustan, "Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migration and Racial Wage Convergence in the North, 1940-1970," Journal of Economic History 69, no. 3 (2009): 755-82. Boustan reports the black-white wage gap narrowing more in the South between 1960 and 1970 (a decrease of -0.089 log points) than in any other region of the United States, including the Midwest (a decrease of -0.069 log points); see her table on 758.
29.
James J. Heckman and Brook S. Payner, "Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina," American Economic Review 79, no. 1 (1989): 138-77; Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Gavin Wright, "The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History," Journal of Economic History 59, no. 2 (1999): 267-89.
30.
For an emphasis on manufacturing, see Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous vs. Episodic Change," and Heckman and Payner, "Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy." On evidence related to other sectors, see Kenneth Y. Chay, "The Impact of Federal Civil Rights Policy on Black Economic Progress: Evidence from the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 51, no. 4 (1998): 608-32.
31.
For a dissenting analysis, see William A. Darity, Jr. and Samuel L. Myers, Jr., Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic Inequality in the United States since 1945 (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1998), 43-59; one of their criticisms of this consensus, related to the impacts of labor-force nonparticipation on earnings data, is addressed below.
32.
For a cohort analysis, see Card and Krueger, "Trends in Relative Black-White Earnings Revisited." Economic studies that recognize social movement activity include Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous vs. Episodic Change," and Wright, "The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History."
33.
For further evidence, see Vroman, "Industrial Change and Black Men’s Relative Earnings."
34.
For early public-sector unionization, see Richard B. Freeman, "Unionism Comes to the Public Sector," Journal of Economic Literature 24, no. 1 (1986): 41-86; for its impacts, see Richard B. Freeman and Robert G. Valletta, "The Effects of Public Sector Labor Laws on Labor Market Institutions and Outcomes," in When Public Sector Workers Unionize, ed. Richard B. Freeman and Casey Ichniowski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 81-103.
35.
See, e.g., Martin Carnoy, Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
36.
Wilson, Declining Significance of Race; Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; Wilson, When Work Disappears; John D. Kasarda, "Entry-Level Jobs, Mobility, and Urban Minority Employment," Urban Affairs Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1983): 21-40; John D. Kasarda, "Jobs, Migration, and Emerging Urban Mismatches," in Urban Change and Poverty, ed. Michael G. H. McGeary and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), 148-98; and John D. Kasarda, "Cities as Places Where People Live and Work: Urban Change and Neighborhood Distress," in Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation, ed. Henry G. Cisneros (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 81-124.
37.
For attention to the early postwar period, see Wilson, Declining Significance of Race, 88-90, and Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged, 30, 65; for key post-1970s discussions, see Wilson, When Work Disappears, 8-9, 29-31, 33, 144-45, 212-13.
38.
Bound and Freeman, "What Went Wrong?"; John Bound and George Johnson, "Changes in the Structure of Wages in the 1980s: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations," American Economic Review 82, no. 3 (1992): 371-92; and Bound and Holzer, "Industrial Shifts, Skill Levels, and the Labor Market."
39.
Card and Lemieux, "Changing Wage Structure and Black-White Wage Differentials"; Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality"; Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein, "Wage Inequality and the New Economy in the U.S.: Does IT-Led Growth Generate Wage Inequality?" Canadian Public Policy-Analyse de Politiques 29 (2003): S203-S221; and Lemieux, "What Do We Really Know About Changes in Wage Inequality?"
40.
Card and Lemieux, "Changing Wage Structure and Black-White Wage Differentials"; Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality"; and Autor, Katz, and Kearney, "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality."
41.
Alan B. Krueger, "How Computers Have Changed the Wage Structure: Evidence from Microdata, 1984-1989," Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 1 (1993): 33-60; Lawrence F. Katz and David H. Autor, "Changes in the Wage Structure and Earnings Inequality," in Handbook of Labor Economics, vol. 3, ed. Orley C. Ashenfelter and David Card (New York: Elsevier, 1999), 1463-555; David H. Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane, "The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration," Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 4 (2003): 1279-333; and Autor, Katz, and Kearney, "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality." See also the discussion by Leicht, "Broken Down by Race and Gender?"
42.
Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality"; and Mishel and Bernstein, "Wage Inequality and the New Economy"; see also Autor, Katz, and Kearney, "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality."
43.
Morris and Western, "Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century."
44.
On wage penalties, see Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization of America, and Henry S. Farber, "The Incidence and Costs of Job Loss: 1982-1991," special issue, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Special Issue 1 (1993): 73-132. For the evidence on sectoral shifts, see Bound and Johnson, "Changes in the Structure of Wages." See also Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality"; their term "outlier" is on 770.
45.
Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality"; the term "mundane" appears on 774.
46.
For evidence on the minimum wage, see John DiNardo, Nicole M. Fortin, and Thomas Lemieux, "Labor Market Institutions and the Distribution of Wages, 1973-1992: A Semi-Parametric Approach," Econometrica 64, no. 5 (1996): 1001-44; David S. Lee, "Wage Inequality in the United States during the 1980s: Rising Dispersion or Falling Minimum Wage?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 3 (1999): 977-1023; Morris and Western, "Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century"; Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality"; and Lemieux, "What Do We Really Know About Changes in Wage Inequality?"
47.
On union densities, see Richard B. Freeman, "How Much Has De-Unionization Contributed to the Rise in Male Earnings Inequality?" in Uneven Tides: Rising Inequality in America, ed. Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993), 133-63; DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux, "Labor Market Institutions and the Distribution of Wages"; and David Card, "The Effect of Unions on Wage Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 54, no. 2 (2001): 296-315. See also Morris and Western, "Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century"; and James S. Mosher, "U.S. Wage Inequality, Technological Change, and Decline in Union Power," Politics & Society 35, no. 2 (2007): 225-64.
48.
Card, "The Effect of Unions on Wage Inequality." See also Henry S. Farber, "The Decline of Unionization in the United States: What Can Be Learned from Recent Experience?" Journal of Labor Economics 8, no. 1, pt. 2 (1990): S75-S105; and Lemieux, "What Do We Really Know About Wage Inequality?"
49.
For the enduring influence of sectoral and skills-centered explanations within sociology, see Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman, "Systems of Gender, Race, and Class Inequality"; Chevan and Stokes, "Growth in Family Income Inequality"; and Reid, Adelman, and Jaret, "Women, Race, and Ethnicity."
50.
See for example, Chinhui Juhn, Kevin M. Murphy, and Brooks Pierce, "Accounting for the Slowdown in Black-White Wage Convergence," in Workers and Their Wages: Changing Patterns in the United States, ed. Marvin H. Kosters (Lanham, MD: AEI Press, 1991), 107-43; Bound and Freeman, "What Went Wrong?"; and James P. Smith, "Affirmative Action and the Racial Wage Gap," American Economic Review 83, no. 2 (1993): 79-84.
51.
Smith, "Affirmative Action and the Racial Wage Gap"; and Bound and Freeman, "What Went Wrong?" The latter study focuses on trends for young men, and does not systematically compare these trends to general trends in black-white wage differentials; it is also worth noting that the study shows significant differences in the racial wage gap from the late 1970s and early 1980s depending on which samples are used, e.g., full- or part-time workers, all workers, or only younger workers.
52.
The most systematic treatment is Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality."
53.
Card and Lemieux, "Changing Wage Structure and Black-White Wage Differentials."
54.
Card and DiNardo, "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality." A recent paper by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine indicates that past rates of high-school graduation were lower than typically reported in institutional data, pointing to a more significant decline in schooling than had been recognized. Although this new finding may seem to bolster the skills-mismatch argument, it does not contradict the evidence against skills mismatch presented in the studies discussed here. Because these studies (like Heckman and LaFontaine’s paper) rely on Current Population Survey and Decennial Census data, the actual graduation rates were already accounted for in calculations of the effect of lower educational attainment among African Americans (i.e., skills mismatch) on the racial unemployment gap. See James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine, "The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 13670, December 2007.
55.
See Kasarda, "Entry-Level Jobs, Mobility, and Urban Minority Employment," and Kasarda, "Cities as Places Where People Live and Work." The quote about "centers of information processing" is from Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged, 39.
56.
The so-called spatial mismatch emphasized by Wilson and others has given rise to a very large literature. For an initial formulation, see John F. Kain, "Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization," Quarterly Journal of Economics 82, no. 2 (1968): 175-97. For an early review of the field, see Harry J. Holzer, "The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: What Has the Evidence Shown?" Urban Studies 28, no. 1 (1991): 105-22; for a more recent example of work in this area, see Ted Mouw, "Job Relocation and the Racial Gap in Unemployment in Detroit and Chicago, 1980 to 1990," American Sociological Review 65, no. 5 (2000): 730-53. We do not address this literature here as our primary concern is with the skills-mismatch component of Wilson’s argument.
57.
Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 106-18. See also Suzanne Model, "The Ethnic Niche and the Structure of Opportunity," in The Under-class Debate, ed. Michael Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 161-93; and Norman Fainstein and Susan Nesbitt, "Did the Black Ghetto Have a Golden Age? Class Structure and Class Segregation in New York City, 1949-1970, with Initial Evidence for 1990," Journal of Urban History 23, no. 1 (1996): 3-28.
58.
Vroman, "Industrial Change and Black Men’s Relative Earnings."
59.
Lim, "On the Back of Blacks?"
60.
On the historical importance of manufacturing for black employment in Chicago, see "Appendix: Black Metropolis, 1961," in St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1962] 1993); and Herbert R. Northrup, Negro Employment in Basic Industry: A Study of Racial Policies in Six Industries, vol. 1: Studies of Negro Employment (Philadelphia: Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania, 1970). For sociological work on Chicago’s post-1970s job losses in this sector, see Wilson, When Work Disappears, and Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 321-27.
61.
Virginia Parks, "Revisiting Shibboleths of Race and Urban Economy: Black Employment in Manufacturing and the Public Sector Compared, Chicago 1950-2000," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 1 (2011): 110-1290. This study used data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to measure the relative dependence of blacks and whites on manufacturing and public sector employment between 1950 and 2000. Relative dependence was calculated using an index of representation, a ratio of a group’s share of employment in an industry relative to the group’s share of total employment. Manufacturing employment was classified using the 1950 industrial codes. The census classification for workers employed in local, state, and federal government was used to measure public employment.
62.
Peter K. Eisinger, "The Economic Conditions of Black Employment in Municipal Bureaucracies," American Journal of Political Science 26, no. 4 (1982): 754-71; and Peter Eisinger, "Local Civil Service Employment and Black Socioeconomic Mobility," Social Science Quarterly 67, no. 1 (1986): 169-75. For recent work on black earnings in the public sector, see Moshe Semyonov and Noah Lewin-Epstein, "The Declining Racial Earnings’ Gap in the United States: Multi-level Analysis of Males’ Earnings, 1960-2000," Social Science Research 38 (2009): 296-311.
63.
Roger Waldinger , "Did Manufacturing Matter? The Experience of Yesterday’s Second Generation: A Reassessment,"International Migration Review41, no. 1 (2007): 3-39.
64.
Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; Wilson, When Work Disappears; and Wacquant, Urban Outcasts.
65.
William A. Sundstrom, "Explaining the Racial Unemployment Gap: Race, Region, and the Employment Status of Men, 1940," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 50, no. 3 (1997): 460-77; the quote comes from 475. See also Robert W. Fairlie and William A. Sundstrom, "The Emergence, Persistence, and Recent Widening of the Racial Unemployment Gap," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 52, no. 2 (1999): 252-70; Bound and Freeman, "Black Economic Progress"; Nanda R. Shrestha, Wilbur I. Smith, and Charles L. Evans, "Black Migration at the Margin of Freedom," International Journal of Population Geography 9 (2003): 113-39; and William E. Spriggs and Rhonda M. Williams, "What Do We Need to Explain about African American Unemployment?" in Prosperity for All? The Economic Boom and African Americans, ed. Robert Cherry and William M. Rodgers III (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 188-207.
66.
Margo, "Explaining Black-White Wage Convergence"; and Katz, Stern, and Fader, "The New African American Inequality."
67.
Bound and Freeman, "What Went Wrong?"; Robert W. Fairlie and William A. Sundstrom, "The Racial Unemployment Gap in Long-Run Perspective," American Economic Review 87, no. 2 (1997): 306-10; and Fairlie and Sundstrom, "The Emergence, Persistence, and Recent Widening of the Racial Unemployment Gap."
68.
M. V. Lee Badgett, "Rising Black Unemployment: Changes in Job Stability or in Employ-ability?"Review of Black Political Economy22, no. 3 ( 1994): 55-75.
69.
Fairlie and Sundstrom, "The Racial Unemployment Gap in Long-Run Perspective," 309; emphasis in original.
70.
Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, "How Unregulated in the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution," American Journal of Sociology104, no. 4 (1999): 1030-60.
71.
See, for example, Brown, "Black-White Earnings Ratios Since the Civil Rights Act"; Heckman, "Impact of Government"; Wayne Vroman, "Black Men’s Relative Earnings: Are the Gains Illusory?" Industrial and Labor Relations Review 44, no. 1 (1990): 83-98; Card and Krueger, "Trends in Relative Black-White Earnings Revisited"; Margo, "Explaining the Black-White Wage Convergence"; Darity and Myers, Persistent Disparity, 43-59; and Heckman, Lyons, and Todd, "Understanding Black-White Wage Differentials."
72.
Western and Pettit, "Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration," 573; see also Bruce Western, "The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality," American Sociological Review 67, no. 4 (2002): 526-46; and Amitabh Chandra, "Is the Convergence in the Racial Wage Gap Illusory?" National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 9476, January 2003.
73.
Katz, Stern, and Fader, "The New African American Inequality," 84-85; see also Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).
74.
Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, "‘Soft’ Skills and Race: An Investigation of Black Men’s Employment Problems," Work and Occupations 23, no. 3 (1996): 252-76; and Kathryn M. Neckerman and Joleen Kirschenman, "Hiring Strategies, Racial Bias, and Inner-City Workers," Social Problems 38, no. 4 (1991): 433-47.
75.
See, e.g., Leslie McCall, "Sources of Racial Wage Inequality in Metropolitan Labor Markets: Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Differences," American Sociological Review 66, no. 4 (2001): 520-41. See also, however, the more recent findings on this question in Reid, Adelman, and Jaret, "Women, Race, and Ethnicity."
76.
For the postwar period, see Margo, "Explaining the Black-White Wage Convergence," and Heckman, Lyons, and Todd, "Understanding Black-White Wage Differentials." For more recent decades, see Western and Pettit, "Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration," and Pettit and Ewert, "Employment Gains and Wage Declines."
