Search Results
Working Paper
Displacement, asymmetric information and heterogeneous human capital
In a seminal paper Gibbons and Katz (1991; GK) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layoffs than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers Survey (DWS). In this paper, we take advantage of many more years of DWS data to examine how the difference in wage losses across plant closing and layoff varies with race and gender. We find that the differences between white males and the other groups are striking and complex. The "lemons" effect ...
Journal Article
Does affirmative action work?
After four decades, we are still debating how much impact affirmative action can and should have on opportunities and outcomes at work.
Journal Article
Gender wage gap may be much smaller than most think
Journal Article
Wage disparities and industry segregation: a look at Black-White income inequality from 1950-2000
The last sixty years has been a period of profound change for Black Americans. In the 1950s and 1960s, Supreme Court cases and federal legislation eliminated many unfair and discriminatory laws passed over the course of the prior century that had effectively subordinated Black Americans to second class citizenship. A variety of social and economic conditions have changed during the roughly six decades since the modern Civil Rights Movement began, in part as a result of these decisions, and significant shifts in cultural norms and beliefs, as well. The purpose of this article is to explore ...
Working Paper
Which industries are the best employers for women? an application of a new Equal Employment Opportunity Index
This paper introduces and proposes a policy application for a new Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Index. The index is comprised of multiple measures of employers' human resource management outcomes and is designed to reflect employers' systemic EEO efforts. The index is applied to industry data from the Current Population Survey, and the tenets of Total Quality Management (TQM) theory are used for interpretation of results. It is found that the mining/construction industry provides a relatively inhospitable climate for women in the form, primarily, of a high degree of gender-related ...
Working Paper
What determines public support for affirmative action?
We present a model of public higher education finance in which demand for educational services can exceed supply because of indivisibilities in educational investment. In such situations, a screening mechanism--which may be imperfect because of direct or indirect discrimination--is required for allocation. We show how changes in the education premium affect political support for affirmative action policies. When the education premium is relatively low, the matching efficiency gains provided by affirmative action policies are relatively high compared to the opportunity cost of not acquiring ...
Journal Article
The gender wage gap
The actual gender wage disparity (which compares the wages of male and female workers with similar labor-force characteristics) is lower than the raw gender earnings gap.
Working Paper
Decomposing the gender wage gap with sample selection adjustment: evidence from Colombia
Despite the remarkable improvement of female labor market characteristics, a sizeable gender wage gap exists in Colombia. We employ quantile regression techniques to examine the degree to which current small differences in the distribution of observable characteristics can explain the gender gap. We find that the gap is largely explained by gender differences in the rewards to labor market characteristics and not by differences in the distribution of characteristics. We claim that Colombian women experience both a ?glass ceiling effect?? and also (what we call) a ?quicksand floor effect? ...
Journal Article
What's in a name? reconciling conflicting evidence on ethnic names
One study shows that Kenya and Hakim might have more trouble getting their resumes noticed than Allison and Brad do. But another study indicates that distinctively African-American names don't lead to worse economic outcomes in adulthood.
Working Paper
Does science discriminate against women? Evidence from academia, 1973–97
This study uses data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to evaluate differences in employment outcomes for academic scientists by gender. A decomposition of estimated salary differences shows that over time, gender salary differences can partly be explained by differences in observable characteristics for faculty at the assistant and associate ranks. Substantial gender salary differences for full professors are not explained by observable characteristics. Probit and duration model estimates indicate gender differences in the probability of promotion, making it less likely for women to be ...