If labor supply curves are not perfectly inelastic, wage discrimination induces some minority workers to leave the labor force. Studies of discrimination that focus only on wage differentials overlook these disincentive effects on minority employment. This article introduces a method of estimating the employment effects of wage discrimination and applies it to data on men and women from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation. The authors find that wage discrimination against women caused a net loss of over four million jobs, supporting Gary Becker's contention that discriminatory employers use labor inefficiently. Copyright 1992 by MIT Press.

The authors use three duration models to estimate the effects of disability benefits on the hazard of returning to work and on the expected duration of work absences. The results show that disincentives exist even when disability benefits are not conditioned on the recipient remaining out of work. In addition, blacks and women are found to be absent longer than white men. Durations of work absences are also influenced by available wages, the type and severity of injury, the physical demands of the jobs for which the worker is qualified, and the willingness of employers to help the worker return to work. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.

We estimate models of workers compensation claim duration for a sample of Canadian workers with serious low-back injuries. The models extend recent duration research by allowing worker characteristics to affect duration dependence through the nonlocation parameters of the duration distribution. We compare results for modified Weibull models and piecewise-constant hazard rate models of duration dependence. The results show that workers' responses to elapsed claim duration vary significantly with their characteristics and with economic incentives to return to work. Further, allowing for heterogeneity in duration dependence effects can dramatically change the coefficient estimates of the variables that determine the location parameter of the duration distribution.