A Test of Dual Labor Market TheoryWilliam T. Dickens and Kevin Lang No 1314, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: Despite substantial differences in their views of the appropriate policy response to the existence of poverty, neither the proponents of dual market theory nor its critics have proposed potentially conclusive tests of the dual market hypothesis.This paper presents a test of the two central propositions of dual market theory -- 1) the existence of two distinct labor markets with different wage setting mechanisms and 2) the existence of barriers to mobility between the labor markets. We find considerable support for both hypothesis. Estimation of a switching model of wage determination with unknown regimes yields two distinct wage equations. The one which most workers are associated with closely resembles the standard human capital regression with significant returns to education and experience. The other equation is flat with no returns to human capital. These two equations resemble the predictions of dual market theory for the "primary" and "secondary" markets respectively. Further, we present evidence that(at least) some non-white workers are involuntarily confined to the secondary market. This crowding of minority workers into the low wage labor market accounts for a substantial portion of white/non-white wage differences. We interpret these results as providing empirical support for the dual market hypothesis and for recent theoretical work on efficiency wagemodels. In addition, combining the efficiency wage argument with the observation that much of the white/non-white wage difference is explained by the exclusion of non-whites from the primary sector suggests an explanation for the persistance of wage differences. Date: 1984-04 Published as Dickens, William T. and Kevin Lang. "A Test of Dual Labor Market Theory." American Economic Review, Vol. 75, No. 4, (Steptember 1985), pp. 792-805. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1314 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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