This paper summarizes recent research in economics that investigates differentials by race and gender in the labor market. We start with a statistical overview of the trends in labor market outcomes by race, gender and Hispanic origin, including some simple regressions on the determinants of wages and employment. This is followed in Section 3 by an extended review of current theories about discrimination in the labor market, including recent extensions of taste-based theories, theories of occupational exclusion, and theories of statistical discrimination. Section 4 discusses empirical research that provides direct evidence of discrimination in the labor market, beyond "unexplained gaps" in wage or employment regressions. The remainder of the paper reviews the evidence on race and gender gaps, particularly wage gaps. Section 5 reviews research on the impact of pre-market human capital differences in education and family background that differ by race and gender. Section 6 reviews the impact of differences in both the levels and the returns to experience and seniority, with discussion of the role of training and labor market search and turnover on race and gender differentials. Section 7 reviews the role of job characteristics (particularly occupational characteristics) on the gender wage gap. Section 8 reviews the smaller literature on differences in fringe benefits by gender. Section 9 is an extensive discussion of the empirical work that accounts for changes in the trends in race and wage differentials over time. Of particular interest is the new research literature that investigates the impact of widening wage inequality on race and gender wage gaps. Section 10 reviews research that relates policy changes to race and gender differentials, including anti-discrimination policy. The paper concludes with comments about a future research agenda.
This paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate. The empirical study shows that differences in the U.S. earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills, but from different home countries, are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration.
This paper analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations. The author assumes that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process. The skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic environment in which parents make their investments or "ethnic capital." The empirical evidence reveals that the skills of today's generation depend not only on the skills of their parents but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parent's generation. Copyright 1992, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper investigates whether the ethnic skill differentials introduced into the United States by the inflow of very dissimilar immigrant groups during the Great Migration of 1880-1910 have disappeared during the past century. An analysis of the 1910, 1940, and 1980 Censuses and the General Social Surveys reveals that those ethnic differentials have indeed narrowed, but that it might take four generations, or roughly 100 years, for them to disappear. The analysis also indicates that the economic mobility experienced by American-born blacks, especially since World War Two, resembles that of the white ethnic groups that made up the Great Migration.
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This paper estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of discrepancy by race and ethnicity in college attendance. When the returns to college education rose, college enrollment of whites responded much more quickly than that of minorities. Parental income is a strong predictor of this response. However, using NLSY data, we find that it is the long-run factors associated with parental background and income and not short-term credit constraints facing college students that account for the differential response by race and ethnicity to the new labor market for skilled labor. Policies aimed at improving these long-term factors are far more likely to be successful in eliminating college attendance differentials than are short-term tuition reduction policies.
The test score gap between blacks and whites—on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence—is large enough to have far-reaching social and economic consequences. In their introduction to this book, Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips argue that eliminating the disparity would dramatically reduce economic and educational inequality between blacks and whites. Indeed, they think that closing the gap would do more to promote racial equality than any other strategy now under serious discussion. The book offers a comprehensive look at the factors that contribute to the test score gap and discusses options for substantially reducing it.
The authors regress young adult wages on current age and the score of a basic skills test that was administered over ten years earlier, when respondents were preparing to leave high school and embark on work careers or postsecondary education. Controlling for this one measure of premarket skill greatly reduces the measured black-white wage gap for young adults. The authors' results suggest that the black-white wage gap primarily reflects a black-white skill gap that exists before young men and women enter the labor market. This skill gap in part reflects measured black-white differences in wealth and family background.
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