Large disparities between blacks and whites in both earnings and income have persisted during the period since World War II. In this paper estimates are presented of the contribution of labor market discrimination to the earnings differential. Lower and upper bounds on this contribution are set. Also measured is the extent to which labor market…

Data from the Current Population Survey of 1971 are used in this paper to investigate the ways in which various population groups utilize their earnings capacity. The hypotheses tested in this paper are: (1) that groups are poor primarily because they fail to utilize their earnings potential effectively; and (2) that the high incidence of poverty…