Has Salary Discrimination Really Disappeared from Major League Baseball?

One of the most thoroughly studied aspects of the labor market is that of wage discrimination. Especially since the passage of the Equal Pay Act (1963) and the Civil Rights Act (1964), a substantial body of research has addressed the question of the extent to which minorities receive the “equal pay for equal work” that the acts set forth as a fundamental goal. Perhaps the most serious conceptual problem with such studies, however, is the difficulty of measuring the productivity of workers. For example, education and experience, two traditional proxy measures of productivity, may be either unavailable in a detailed form or biased by measurement error. Sports, in general, and baseball in particular, are often cited as ideal areas of study for researchers because, through the publishing of virtually every performance and compensation statistic imaginable, worker productivity and detailed salary figures are readily available for analysis. In “The Sports Business as a Labor Market Laboratory,” Kahn [2000, 75] writes: