Why Do Minority Men Earn Less? A Study of Wage Differentials among the Highly Educated (original) (raw)
Related papers
Demography, 2019
Despite efforts to improve the labor market situation of African Americans, the racial earnings gap has endured in the United States. Most prior studies on racial inequality have considered its cross-sectional or period patterns. This study adopts a demographic perspective to examine the evolution of earnings trajectories among white and black men across cohorts in the United States. Using more than 40 years of longitudinal earningsrecordsfromtheU.S.SocialSecurityAdministrationmatchedtotheSurveyof Income and Program Participation, our analyses reveal that the cohort trends in the racial earnings gap follow quite different patterns by education. Race continues to be a salient dimension of economic inequality over the life course and across cohorts, particularly at the top and the bottom of the educational distribution. Although the narrowing of the racial gap among high school graduates is in itself a positive development, it unfortunately derives primarily from the deteriorating economic position for whites without a college degree rather than an improvement in economic standing of their black counterparts.
Decomposing Black-White Wage Gaps Across Distributions: Young U.S. Men and Women in 1990 vs. 2011
2016
We investigate changes in black-white wage gaps across wage distributions for young men and women in the U.S. between 1990 and 2011. Gaps are decomposed into composition and structural effects using a semi-parametric framework. Further, we investigate the roles of occupational choice and self-selection. We find a fall in the composition effect shrinks the wage gap at the lower end of the distribution for men and women. Conversely, an increase in the composition effect for men, and an increase in the structural effect for women, drives a widening of the wage gap at the upper end of the wage distribution.
Understanding the Sources of Ethnic and Racial Wage Gaps and Their Implications for Policy
Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research, 2005
Previous studies show that controlling for ability measured in the teenage years eliminates young adult wage gaps for all groups except black males, for whom the gap is reduced by approximately three-fourths. This suggests that disparity in skills, rather than the differential treatment of such skills in the market, produces racial and ethnic wage differentials. However, minority children and their parents may have pessimistic expectations about receiving fair rewards for their skills in the labor market and so they may invest less in skill formation. Poor schools may also depress cognitive achievement, even in the absence of any discrimination.
Long-Term Earnings Differentials between African American and White Men by Educational Level
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Racial wage differentials among young adults: Evidence from the 1990s
Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 1994
This study seeks to decompose wage differentials between black and white male young adults into those related to labor market discrimination and those resulting from human capital endowments. The importance of testing for significant differences in wage equations before conducting decomposition analysis is emphasized. Study results demonstrate that ignoring correction for the sample selection bias resulting from black-white differences in the probability of being employed would lead to an underestimation of the size of wage differentials. The study also shows that the results of models based on different assumptions regarding the nondiscriminatory wage structure might lead to different conclusions pertinent to the extent of labor market discrimination. Implications for public policy development are discussed.
Education and Labor Market Discrimination
We propose a model that combines statistical discrimination and educational sorting that explains why blacks get more education than do whites of similar cognitive ability. Our model explains the difference between blacks and whites in the relations between education and AFQT and between wages and education. It cannot easily explain why, conditional only on AFQT, blacks earn no more than do whites. It does, however, suggest, that when comparing the earnings of blacks and whites, one should control for both AFQT and education in which case a substantial black-white wage differential reemerges. We explore and reject the hypothesis that differences in school quality between blacks and whites explain the wage and education di erentials. Our findings support the view that some of the black-white wage di erential reflects the operation of the labor market.
Social Science Research, 2004
Using an unusually detailed definition of jobs (labor market-occupation-industry cells), I assess whether the Black-White wage gap increases as one ascends the wage hierarchy of local labor markets. Additionally, I test whether the tendency for Black-dominated jobs to pay less than other jobs is stronger among jobs that offer high pay relative to other jobs in the local labor market. There are several important results from the hierarchical linear models. First, there is a substantial net pay penalty associated with Black-dominated jobs, and there is some evidence that this penalty is stronger for Black workers than Whites. Second, the job racial composition effect is weaker among high-paying jobs. In contrast, the net pay gap within jobs is positively associated with the overall pay in a job, implying that ensuring equal access to high-paying jobs will only a partially ameliorate Black-White wage inequality.
The impact of cognitive skills on the distribution of the black-white wage gap
Labour Economics, 2006
In this paper we use a semi-parametric estimation procedure to examine differences in the distribution of wages for black and white male workers in the US. In keeping with recent studies we find that differences in cognitive skills are an important determinant of the black-white wage gap and can explain almost the entire male racial wage gap among high wage workers. However, we find that equalising the distribution of cognitive skills will be less successful in reducing this gap at the lower end of the distribution.
The Role of Location in Evaluating Racial Wage Disparity
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is specified to be a function of education, experience, and an indicator variable identifying race. We analyze this approach in a context in which individuals live and work in different locations (and thus face different housing prices and wages). Our model provides a justification for the traditional approach, but with the important caveat that the regression should include location-specific fixed effects. Empirical analyses of men in U.S. labor markets demonstrate that failure to condition on location causes us to (i) overstate the decline in black-white wage disparity over the past 60 years, and (ii) understate racial and ethnic wage gaps that remain after taking into account measured cognitive skill differences that emerge when workers are young. JEL: J31, J71, R23.