financial markets and growth the last five years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth this issue had been extensively studied nearly two decades earlier by goldsmith 1969 mckinnon 1973 shaw 1973 and others who produced considerable evidence that financial development correlates with growth but their work though insightful lacked analytical foundations in traditional growth theory financial intermediation could be related to the level of the capital stock per worker or to the level of productivity but not to their respective growth rates the latter were ascribed to exogenous technical progress the recent revival of interest in the link between financial development and growth stems mainly from the insights and techniques of endogenous growth models which have shown that there can be self sustaining growth without exogenous technical progress and that the growth rate can be related to preferences technology income distribution and institutional arrangements this provides the theoretical underpinning that early contributors lacked tinancial intermediation can be shown to have not only level effects but also growth effects the resulting models have offered important insights into the effect of financial development on growth and vice versa they have also provided new impetus to empirical research on these issues this paper reviews the ground covered so far on the theoretical and empirical front and points to some still unresolved issues

can the human capital approach explain life cycle wage differentials between races and sexes i introduction the trends in gender and racial wage gaps have continued to receive the attention of researchers and policy makers due to their mounting social significance substantial literature concludes that after world war ii the black white pay gap shrank rapidly until the mid 1970s this trend was reversed in the 1980s card and dinardo 2002 couch and daly 2002 darity and myers 1998 o neill 1990 smith and welch 1989 1 in contrast the gender pay gap persisted for four decades after world war ii only in the 1980s did it start to narrow yet it showed only a little progress in the 1990s blau ferber and winkler 2002 goldin 1990 o neill 2003 although a large number of studies have been purported to investigate the sources of male female and black white pay gaps most have not addressed the issue of whether or not the individuals being observed have changed their economic status over their lifetimes the major problem is that longitudinal data are not available over a long enough period to determine the age earnings profiles 2 by using the national longitudinal survey of youth data 1979 cohort nlsy79 this paper examines gender and racial wage gaps among individuals of the same age in an effort to eliminate major life cycle differences while at the same time tracking the changes in the wage gaps over their life spans in particular we would like to provide answers to the following questions what factors can account for the narrowing widening gender wage gaps among blacks whites as they age can the observed life cycle wage gaps be attributed to different paths of postschool human capital accumulation since today s individuals regardless of race or sex have on average completed similar years of schooling among the youth cohort the observed disparity in wages between races and sexes may simply reflect the differences in the quality of schooling family background and postschool investment 3 given that school quality and family background are essentially fixed for an individual as he or she ages in order to address the questions above this paper attempts to further examine the differences in postschool human capital investment behavior among individuals past estimates of the structural parameters for the model of postschool human capital accumulation have however not been fruitful benporath 1970 brown 1976 haley 1976 heckman 1976a 1976b rosen 1976 the major reasons as heckman 1976b points out are that dynamic models are difficult to solve explicitly and that the proportion of time spent investing in on the job training cannot be measured directly moreover to fulfill the dynamic concepts of human capital accumulation longer period longitudinal data must be used to explore the life cycle view of individual wages 4 the lack of empirical investigation in relation to the continuous time dynamic model using panel data therefore leads us to develop an alternative empirical version for estimating the structural parameters of the wage function over a lifetime in other words the purpose of our study is to estimate a dynamic structural model based on the theory of optimal human capital accumulation in accordance with this theory of human capital the wage and its life path can be viewed as the outcome of an optimal path of human capital investment over an individual s life cycle instead of comparing the differences in the outcome of this optimization process i e wages we estimate the key parameters in determining the life cycle wage path as well as further empirically identifying the sources of the wage gap our empirical results first suggest that the male female wage gap mainly arises from gender difference in the marginal costs of human capital production as men in general spend more time in the labor market and gain more work experience than women they tend to have lower marginal costs in the process of human capital production

racial earnings disparities and family structure one explanation for the widening of racial earnings gaps among family heads during the 1980s is that black families were increasingly headed by females during that period this explanation is tested using data on black and white family heads in 1976 and 1985 from the institute for research on poverty s current population survey log earnings equations corrected for selection bias and for the endogeneity of labor force participation are estimated for blacks and whites in 1976 and 1985 if the impact of rising female family headship on labor force participation is ignored one finds support for the family structure explanation but support for alternative explanations is also found there are substantial impacts of within race gender discrimination and of market racial discrimination when the endogeneity of family structure is taken into account further support is found for the view that endowment differences only explain a modest portion of the rising gap in earnings between black and white family heads

transition economies performance and challenges i present data and assess the first twelve years of the transition from plan to market transformations have taken place but the income gap between the transition and advanced economies has widened transition countries further east have performed worse than those further west but policies matter all countries carried out quickly type i reforms such as macroeconomic stabilization price liberalization small scale privatization and breakup of state owned enterprises they differed in type ii reforms such as large scale privatization and development of banking and legal systems countries that developed a functioning legal framework and corporate governance have performed better than others

the hidden transformation the changing role of the state after the collapse of communism in central and eastern europe this article reviews the state s role in the transition economies of central and eastern europe among the countries poland is perceived as the leader because it was the first economy to emerge from the decline following the transition as well the only eu member state to survive the crisis without a recession this success is often attributed to the high quality of government however we show that this popular perception is false and that state malfunctions on numerous fronts may soon impede polish growth prospects in poland the only bright spot is the quality of the financial supervision which should serve as a role model for other countries we attribute the malfunctions to the eu accession period that resulted in an unchecked growth of the government and contributed to the weakening of political and legal institutions copyright 2011 oxford university press

employment discrimination in northern ireland and the good friday agreement abstract the paper analyses employment differences between northern ireland s catholics and protestants and examines whether the good friday agreement signed in 1998 was followed by an improvement in the relative position of catholics

estimating a wage curve for britain 1973 90 following a w phillips s 1958 original work on the united kingdom applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time series data sets however it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models this paper adopts a different approach it uses macroeconomic data on 175 000 british workers from 1973 to 1990 to provide evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped relationship linking the level of pay to the local rate of unemployment the paper casts doubt on standard ideas in macroeconomics regional economics and labor economics copyright 1994 by royal economic society

black white differences in inflation 1974 1991 abstract food s budget share for blacks fell substantially relative to that of whites from 1974 to 1991 much of this decline cannot be explained by improvements in blacks cpi deflated income or any other variables i attribute this unexplained fall in food s share much larger for blacks than whites to an unmeasured rise in income in the case of whites the unmeasured rise in real income is attributable to cpi bias in the case of blacks i believe that in addition to cpi bias there is a pattern of declining race specific price premia from 1974 1991

experience tenure and wage growth of young black and white men this paper studies the source of differences in wage growth between young black and white workers focusing on terminal high school graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth we estimate the returns to on the job tenure and general labor market experience using ordinary least squares altonji and shakotko and topel estimators results from all three estimators indicate that returns to general experience for black workers trail those for white workers but that black workers earn equal if not higher returns to tenure than do white workers

racial discrimination in the labor market theory and empirics we review theories of race discrimination in the labor market taste based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of wage differentials but do not address employment and unemployment at their current state of development models of statistical discrimination based on rational stereotypes have little empirical content it is plausible that models combining elements of the search models with statistical discrimination could fit the data we suggest possible avenues to be pursued and comment briefly on the implication of existing theory for public policy jel j15 j31 j64 j71

growth in post soviet russia a tale of two transitions abstract in the early stages of post soviet russia s economic transition small scale entrepreneurial activity appeared to be a strong engine of growth moreover striking regional variations in initial conditions and adopted policy reforms appeared useful in accounting statistically for observed regional variations in entrepreneurial activity here we investigate whether these relationships have persisted as russia s transition has continued to evolve and find that they have not we then document that the emergence of bank issued credit virtually non existent outside of moscow prior to 2000 has been an important engine of growth since 2000 thus to date russia s post soviet development appears as a tale of two distinct transition paths

white discrimination in provision of black education plantations and towns abstract we present a model of public provision of education for blacks in two discriminatory regimes white plantation controlled and white yeoman town controlled we show that the ability to migrate to a non discriminating district constrains the ability of both types of regimes to discriminate the model produces time series of educational outcomes for whites and blacks that mimic the behavior seen in post reconstruction south carolina to the onset of the civil rights act it also fits the post world war ii black white income differentials

reconciling the wage curve and the phillips curve the wage curve is the negative relationship that links wage levels to the unemployment rate it fits accurately with modern non competitive labour market models but goes against a phillips curve modelling because the latter ties wage growth to the unemployment rate in this article we present a comprehensive review of these non competitive models highlighting recent contributions that try to eliminate the possible gap that exists between the concepts of the wage curve on the one hand and the phillips curve on the other copyright blackwell publishers ltd 2005

producing change or bagging opportunity the effects of discrimination litigation on women in supermarket management despite women s advancement in the workplace over the past 40 years their representation in top level positions remains disproportionately low relative to that of men this raises the question of what factors drive greater gender equality in managerial ranks using national equal employment opportunity eeo 1 data for the supermarket industry this article proposes that high profile sex discrimination lawsuit filings provide the type of intense pressure that leads to increased female managerial representation results from fixed effects models demonstrate the significance of litigation in the short and long run especially for women employed by supermarkets located in the most progressive u s appellate court jurisdictions the findings also provide support for a normative effect on change based on regional variation in public orientation toward gender equality

does wealth explain black white differences in early employment careers in this article i inquire about the effects initial wealth has on black white differences in early employment careers i set up a dynamic model in which individuals simultaneously search for a job and accumulate wealth and fit it to data from the national longitudinal survey 1979 cohort regime changes and decompositions of racial differences reveal that differences in the labor market environment and in preferences account fully for racial gaps in wealth and in wages persisting several years after high school graduation differences in initial wealth partially explain differences in early employment careers

the labor market effects of sex and race discrimination laws westudytheeffectsofstatesexandracediscriminationlawsthatwerepassedprior to federal antidiscrimination legislation state sex discrimination laws targeted discrimination in pay only because an equal pay constraint raises the relative price of female labor we would expect the relative employment of females to decline we find robust evidence that state equal pay laws for women reduced relative employment of both black women and white women we also find some evidence of positive effects of race discrimination laws on earnings of blacks relative to whites although no evidence of employment effects jel j15 j16 j18 j23 i introduction public policies to narrow the gaps in labor market outcomes between men and women and between whites and minorities have a long and controversial history two pieces of federal legislation stand out as perhaps the most significant such policies the first was the equal pay act of 1963 which requires equal pay for equal work noting some exceptions but explicitly prohibiting a worker s sex as one of them the second was title vii of the civilrightsactof1964 makingitillegaltodiscriminate in hiring discharge compensation and so on on the basis of race color religion sex or national origin two other important landmarks in the evolution of these policies at the federal level were amendments to title vii embodied in the equal employment opportunity act eeoa of 1972 which expanded coverage and increased the enforcement powers of the equal employment opportunity commission eeoc and executive orders 10925 1961 11246 1965 and 11375 1967 which laid the groundwork for affirmative action although the phrase has its origins in title vii 1

the wage curve in russia 1995 2005 abstract this study draws on data collected for russia to investigate the existence of a wage curve over the period 1995 2005 when wage levels are expressed in u s dollars we find a highly significant negative wage elasticity coefficient close to 0 1

the labor market impact of state level anti discrimination laws 1940 1960 by the time congress passed the 1964 civil rights act 98 of non southern blacks 40 of all blacks already resided in states with fair employment laws prohibiting labor market discrimination using census data from the integrated public use microdata series the author assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers relative income unemployment labor force participation migration and occupational and industrial distributions in general the fair employment laws adopted in the 1940s appear to have had larger effects than those adopted in the 1950s and the laws had considerably smaller effects on the labor market outcomes of black men than on those of black women

eliminating race differences in school attainment and labor market success in this article we provide quantitative evidence on the effects of monetary incentive schemes designed to reduce racial differences in school attainment and earnings our analysis is based on the structural estimation of a dynamic model of schooling work and occupational choice decisions over the life cycle we consider two recent proposals that although not specifically targeted to blacks can be expected to have differential racial impacts one proposal suggested by robert reich provides a high school graduation bonus to youths from lower income families the other suggested by edmund phelps provides wage subsidies to low wage workers

black white wage inequality employment rates and incarceration the observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks who suffer from a high rate of joblessness the authors estimate the black white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity among working age men in 1999 accounting for labor inactivity including prison and jail incarceration leads to an increase of 7 20 in the black white wage gap adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22 30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58 increasing selection bias which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness explains about two thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998 apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s

occupational segregation and the gender wage gap in a dynamic east asian economy labor markets in the east asian miracle economies have undergone profound changes in recent decades as their comparative advantage in low wage labor diminished and jobs shifted toward higher skill manufacturing and services this study uses an occupational decomposition technique to examine how such shifts in east asia s occupational structures have affected trends in their gender wage gaps the wage gap is decomposed into across occupation and within occupation factors that are each further separated into wage and employment components results based on a comprehensive labor force data set for taiwan show that within occupation pay discrepancies account for the bulk of gender wage inequity

the schooling of southern blacks the roles of legal activism and private philanthropy 1910 1960 improvements in education and educational quality are widely acknowledged to be major contributors to black economic progress in the twentieth century this paper investigates the sources of improvement in black education in the south in the first half of the century and demonstrates the important roles of social activism especially naacp litigation and private philanthropy in improving the quality and availability of public schooling many scholars view education as a rival to social activism in explaining black economic progress but such a view misses the important role of philanthropic and legal interventions in promoting education

male white black wage gaps 1979 1994 a distributional analysis 1 introductionnumerous studies show that during the 1980s the mean white black wage gap among new entrant 0 10 years of potential experience males expanded 1 juhn murphy and pierce 1991 jmp attribute the mean gap s expansion to a widening of the overall u s wage distribution caused by a host of economy wide race neutral changes that led to labor demand shifts toward better educated and better skilled workers regardless of race because african americans tend to be at lower levels of the overall skill distribution the shifts adversely impacted african american men more than white men leading to an expansion in the mean wage gap to arrive at this conclusion jmp decompose the expansion in the mean new entrant wage gap into four components the first two components measure the wage gap s increase because of a widening in observable racial differences in measured characteristics and their prices for example educational attainment and the returns to education the third component captures the contribution of growing racial discrimination and widening differences in unmeasured skills to the wage gap s expansion this term s contribution is measured by the drop in the mean percentile rank of blacks in the white residual wage distribution the fourth component identifies the role of increases in the prices of unmeasured skills and is measured by the increase in the variance of the white residual wage distribution when applied to the march annual demographic files of the current population survey jmp find that from 1979 to 1987 increases in the price of unmeasured skills explain all of the new entrant mean wage gap s expansion indicating that factors that adversely impacted less skilled workers regardless of race are the primary cause of the wage gap s expansion in related work reardon 1997 uses a national sample of white and african american men from the 1980 and 1990 decennial censuses and shows that the mean racial wage gap s expansion is caused by increased variance in the distribution of residual wages generated by labor demand shifts toward high skilled whites and away from medium skilled whites and high skilled african american men the wage gap expands because high skilled african american men earn wages that are similar to those of whites in the middle and upper third of their wage distribution the labor demand shifts led to a stretching or increased variance in the wage distribution that favored high skilled whites relative to high skilled african americans and medium skilled whites this paper makes several contributions to the literature on racial wage gaps and the technical literature on wage decompositions first i examine whether jmp s 1991 results hold up when the analysis is disaggregated by experience and educational attainment this is an important extension for two reasons bound and freeman 1992 rodgers 1997a and others have found that the racial wage gap among high school graduates and particularly among college graduates expanded significantly after the late 1970s over the same time period the variance of wages within these educational categories increased second it is important to determine the extent to which racial inequality that was generated while a cohort was a new entrant persists as it ages the paper s technical innovation is the development of a distribution or skill specific decomposition that identifies whether the stretching of the white wage distribution uniformly contributes to an expansion in racial inequality at all skill levels or quantiles of the wage distribution or whether the contribution of the wage distribution s stretching is specific to a skill level for example does the increase in the price of unmeasured skills explain a greater portion of the increase in the racial wage gap between high skilled african americans and whites than it does between medium skilled african americans and whites

human capital discrimination and the gender wage gap in bangladesh summary this paper investigates changes in the gender wage gap in bangladesh over the period 1999 2009 the gap in average wages between men and women decreased by 31 over this period this paper shows that a key driver of this change was an improvement in female educational qualifications it also demonstrates that the gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrowed much more at the lower end of the wage distribution than at the upper end it attributes this mainly to a decline in discrimination against women implications for policies aimed at more equal access to education and enforcement of equal pay legislation in bangladesh are also identified

the pursuit of opportunity explaining selective black migration abstract this paper examines the destination choices of black migrants during the great migration as previous research has shown educated blacks were more likely to relocate to the north in the pre world war ii era this analysis shows that this tendency can be attributed to the better educated migrants ability to finance transportation costs greater responsiveness to intercity wage differentials and stronger distaste for southern disamenities after 1940 the destination choice gap closed largely because migrant responses to wage differentials and valuation of southern disamenities changed these changes are observed both in the population at large and within birth year cohorts

slavery education and inequality abstract we investigate the effect of slavery on the current level of income inequality across us counties we find that a larger proportion of slaves over population in 1860 persistently increases inequality and in particular inequality across races we also show that a crucial channel of transmission from slavery to racial inequality is human capital accumulation i e current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites finally we provide suggestive evidence that the underlying links run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education

from dark to light skin color and wages among african americans this paper develops and tests a theory referred to as preference for whiteness which predicts that the interracial white black and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens using data drawn from the multi city study of urban inequality and the national survey of black americans we report evidence largely consistent with the theory moreover we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps and find that favorable treatment of lighter skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory

inertial credit and opportunistic arrears in transition in a transition economy enterprise restructuring may exhibit a laffer curve response to tighter credit as a result of rational collective inertia in the presence of a rigid production structure unenforceable contracts and high adjustment costs a contraction in credit finance subtracts more liquidity than enterprises can generate internally because unrestructured firms are forced to extend trade credit to illiquid buyers an increase in their number increases the availability of forced supplier credit in turn increasing the attractiveness of inertial behavior as trade credit cannot be enforced a critical mass of trade and wage arrears causes pressure for a collective bailout thus validating inertial behavior even by reformable firms

trucking deregulation and the black white wage gap the only previous study of the effect of product market deregulation on the black white wage gap found that this gap in the trucking industry declined after trucking deregulation in 1978 that study did not however estimate the separate effects of deregulation on union and nonunion members or on black and white drivers this study does so through an analysis of individual worker information from the march and may cps files for the years 1973 through 1988 the authors find that deregulation is associated with significantly declining black white wage gaps among both union and nonunion drivers this wage pattern is attributable to significant reductions in the real wages of white drivers the real wages of black drivers did not change with deregulation

wages profits and rent sharing the paper suggests a new test for rent sharing in the u s labor market using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector it shows that a rise in a sector s profitability leads after some years to an increase in the long run level of wages in that sector the paper controls for workers characteristics for industry fixed effects and for unionism lester s range of wages is estimated for rent sharing reasons alone at approximately 24 per cent of the mean wage

the impact of banking sector reform in a transition economy evidence from kyrgyzstan we examine the impact of financial sector reform on interest rate levels and spreads using kyrgyz bank level data from 1998 to 2005 we find that in addition to macroeconomic stabilization structural reforms to the banking sector significantly contributed to lower interest rates in particular our results suggest that foreign bank entry and regulatory efforts to increase average bank size were important in reducing deposit rates in contrast we find little evidence that banking sector reform or macroeconomic stabilization has impacted interest rate spreads

divergent paths a new perspective on earnings differences between black and white men since 1940 we present new evidence on the evolution of black white earnings differences among all men including both workers and nonworkers we study two measures i the level earnings gap the racial earnings difference at a given quantile and ii the earnings rank gap the difference between a black man s percentile in the black earnings distribution and the position he would hold in the white earnings distribution after narrowing from 1940 to the mid 1970s the median black white level earnings gap has since grown as large as it was in 1950 at the same time the median black man s relative position in the earnings distribution has remained essentially constant since 1940 so that the improvement then worsening of median relative earnings have come mainly from the stretching and narrowing of the overall earnings distribution black men at higher percentiles have experienced significant advances in relative earnings since 1940 due mainly to strong positional gains among those with college educations large relative schooling gains by blacks at the median and below have been more than counteracted by rising return to skill in the labor market which has increasingly penalized remaining racial differences in schooling at the bottom of the distribution

foreign currency pricing a special case of dollarization is analyzed quotation of prices in dollars the proposed explanation is price stickiness when price adjustment is costly firms prefer to fix their prices in a stable foreign currency in order to avoid frequent price changes the proposed model demonstrates that there are often two nash equilibria in an economy populated by symmetric firms an equilibrium with uniform domestic currency pricing and one with uniform dollar pricing hence foreign currency pricing may exhibit hysteresis the model also demonstrates that the degree of competition in the economy is important in determining the pricing currency

financial structure in the age of globalization using a large panel data set covering 160 countries over the period 1990 to 2010 this article aims to address the question of how financial structure bank based versus market based system changes when economies are liberalized and opened to international capital markets specifically in this study globalization is characterized not only by trade and financial integration but also by other important aspects such as social globalization political globalization and cultural globalization the empirical results support the impacts of globalization on financial structure which are however diverse and strongly depend on the way to measure globalization and financial structure our finding also reveals a significant change in financial structure after the globalization process except the case of low income countries in which financial structure seems to be not correlated with either globalization process or other macroeconomic variables

the impact of federal civil rights policy on black economic progress evidence from the equal employment opportunity act of 1972 the equal employment opportunity act eeoa of 1972 extended civil rights coverage to employers with 15 24 employees while leaving unaffected the civil rights protection for employees of larger firms in conjunction with pre existing state fair employment practice fep laws the eeoa provides a natural experiment in which the treatment and control groups are defined by differences across industries in the fraction of workers employed in the newly covered establishments and across states in the scope of the fep laws applying the treatment and control group methodology to current population survey data the author finds that there were large shifts in the employment and pay practices of the industries most affected by the amendment the timing of the relative gains and their concentration by industry and region provide evidence that the eeoa had a positive impact on the labor market status of african americans

african americans in rural society needed directions in public policy economic theory and historical evidence indicate that economic development is a process that transforms agrarian economies into urban industrial service higher income based economies lewis this transformation has taken place in the united states beginning roughly at the turn of the century and accelerating during the post world war ii period during the last five decades the farm sector once the largest economic sector in the united states has become one of the smallest accounting for approximately 2 of the gnp losing 5 4 million workers and declining in net farm income by 45 million 1982 dollars council of economic advisers 1987 and 1990 thurow this transformation frees up labor and helps provide capital for industrial and manufacturing sectors of the economy however such rapid development also carries economic and social costs which the nation continues to pay the agrarian transformation resulted in the outmigration of millions of americans from the farm to urban and nonfarm rural areas african

affirmative action and labor markets affirmative action remains controversial the controversy extends from the original antidiscrimination legislation and its interpretation to estimates of affirmative action s effect on the labor market this paper provides a progress report on our recent efforts at detecting the effects of affirmative action on minority wages and employment although we find a substantial increase in wages for black men and black women over our sample period the timing of these wage changes is surprising most of the wage gains came prior to 1974 before the establishment of an effective monitoring structure for affirmative action indeed when the powers of the eeoc and ofcc are greatest the wage effects for young blacks are somewhat perverse using eeo 1 reports we find a major shift in black employment toward firms most vulnerable to the monitoring and potential sanctions of the affirmative action programs as with wages the shift in minority employment came prior to the expansion of the powers and budgets of the ee

explaining the racial unemployment gap race region and the employment status of men 1940 although the substantial and persistent gap between the unemployment rates of african americans and whites in the united states first emerged in aggregate statistics covering the 1940s and 1950s disaggregation reveals that the gap already existed in urban areas before 1940 using individual level data on male workers from the 1940 census the author analyzes the causes of the unemployment gap he finds that racial differences in measured human capital and other characteristics can explain all of the racial gap in the south but less than half of the gap in the north this result contrasts with results from studies of wages which have found a larger racial residual in the south than in the north

the wage curve a review in the wage qurve david g blancflower and andrew j oswald argue that there is a fundamental negative relation between wages and the unemployment rate in a worker s local labor market blancflower and oswald use large scale micro data sets to estimate this relation for the united states britain and 10 other countries i review their empirical methods and findings and provide some further evidence on the nature of the wage curve relationship in the united states i conclude that there is a strong statistical correlation between rates of pay and local unemployment although the interpretation of this correlation remains unresolved this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a distributional analysis of the gender wage gap in bangladesh this article empirically investigates the gender wage gap in bangladesh during the period 2005 2009 applying unconditional quantile regression models the article demonstrates that women are paid less than men throughout the wage distribution and the gap is higher at the lower end of the distribution discrimination against women is the primary determinant of the wage gap the article also demonstrates that the observed gender wage gap is likely to be underestimated if we ignore selection in full time employment a number of policy implications are discussed

racial and ethnic differences in wealth in the health and retirement study this paper examines wealth data in the health and retirement study hrs in comparison with asset data in other major surveys the quality of hrs asset data is high missing asset data does remain a problem however to which future hrs analysts must remain sensitive evidence is presented showing that it is no accident that asset data are missing and solutions for imputing missing data are developed finally racial and ethnic wealth disparities are large these minority wealth disparities are due in part to differential inheritances and desired bequests as inequities perpetuate themselves across generations the disparities are also due to lower minority incomes poorer health and an excessively narrow definition of wealth that excludes social security and employer pensions authors

separate and unequal in the labor market human capital and the jim crow wage gap competing explanations for the long standing gap between black and white earnings attribute different weight to wage discrimination and human capital differences using new data on local school quality we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and occupational status gaps in the south despite entrenched racial discrimination in civic life and the lack of federal employment protections the resulting wage gap coincides with the higher end of the range of estimates from the post civil rights era we estimate that truly separate but equal schools would have reduced wage inequality by 29 48

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

changes in the characteristics of american youth implications for adult outcomes we examine changes in the characteristics of american youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success the current generation is more skilled than the previous one blacks and hispanics have gained relative to whites and women have gained relative to men however the skill distribution has widened overall shifts in parental education generate many of the observed changes we also provide speculative estimates suggesting that if recent trends in technology and the supply of human capital continue wage inequality will increase substantially by 2025

a reexamination of the federal private wage differential in the united states the federal private wage differential is reexamined with recent data using specifications similar to those used in three previous studies i find that the federal private wage differential has narrowed since the 1974 79 period analyzed in those studies in addition i discover that wage differentials based on specifications used in the literature are biased upward because the previous studies did not control for detailed occupational and locational characteristics of workers corrected point estimates of the wage gap are much smaller than previous estimates in the literature differences in the gap across demographic groups occupations and locations are also discussed

an investigation into sexual orientation discrimination as an explanation for wage differences this study explores the effects of sexual orientation on earnings it is found that ceteris paribus men living with male partners tend to earn less than other men and women living with female partners tend to earn more than other women these earnings differentials tend to vary by region they also vary by education and occupation for men and with the presence of minor children for women in addition the age earnings profiles of women living with female partners tend to be higher flatter and less concave than those of other women

the effect on black white wage differences of differences in the quantity and quality of education using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth for the years 1979 88 the author examines the extent to which black white differences in educational attainment educational quality and unmeasured individual ability can explain black white wage differences an analysis that corrects for both selectivity and ability biases inherent in estimating the education wage relationship shows that the main source of the black white wage differential is the racial difference in the quality rather than quantity of schooling in fact the author concludes closing the racial gap in the basic skills learned in school could reduce the wage differential by two thirds

estimation of semiparametric censored regression models an application to changes in black white earnings inequality during the 1960s building on the work of chay 1995 this study examines the impact of civil rights policies on black economic progress using individual level panel data many earnings records are censored and the degree of censoring changed during the period of interest consequently valid estimates of the program effects must account for this censoring maximum likelihood estimation can be used if the error terms of the model are identically normally distributed we investigate the value of using weaker assumptions on the error process to estimate the laws impact the analysis shows that there was significant black white earnings convergence in the south during the 1960s we also find that semiparametric estimation methods are informative in pinpointing which parts of the model are mis specified

race and home ownership from the end of the civil war to the present we present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007 black ownership increased by 46 percentage points whereas white ownership increased by 20 points remarkably 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910 part of this early convergence is accounted for by falling white ownership due to movement out of agriculture but most is accounted for by post emancipation gains among blacks after 1910 white and black households increased ownership but the racial gap barely changed we discuss the influence of residential segregation public policy and permanent income on the ownership gap

networks in labor markets wage and employment dynamics and inequality we present a model of labor markets that accounts for the social network through which agents hear about jobs we show that both wages and employment are positively associated a strong form of correlation across time and agents we also analyze the decisions of agents regarding staying in the labor market or dropping out if there are costs to staying in the labor market then networks of agents that start with a worse wage status will have higher drop out rates and there will be a persistent differences in wages between groups according to the starting states of their networks

economic inequality new methods for new trends two positions dominate the debate over the recent increases in economic inequality in the united states the job skill mismatch thesis attributes rising inequality to growth in the number of high skill high wage jobs that leaves less skilled workers behind the polarization thesis in contrast argues that the service shift generates growth in the number of both high wage and low wage jobs and declines in the middle standard summary measures of distributional inequality cannot discriminate between these depictions of where job growth is occurring we propose new methods for measurement that provide both summary and detailed information about the distributional shifts in earnings and aframework for statistical inference using data from the curent population survey cps on yearly earnings from 1967 to 1987 we show that the trends in distributional inequality vary considerably by race gender and time while the evidence provides more support for the polarization argument this thesis needs refinement if it is to account for the variations in changing inequality observed here

incarceration and racial inequality in men s employment to estimate employment population ratios for black and white men with an adjustment for incarceration a factor overlooked by most research on employment inequality the authors combine data from sur

the impact of the great migration on mortality of african americans evidence from the deep south the great migration the massive migration of african americans out of the rural south to largely urban locations in the north midwest and west was a landmark event in u s our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of african americans born in the early twentieth century south this inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration

inequality transfers and growth new evidence from the economic transition in poland this paper analyzes the evolution of inequality in poland during the economic transition that began in 1989 1990 using microdata from the household budget surveys we find that after a brief spik

the payoff to skill in the third industrial revolution1 is the third industrial revolution indeed driven by rising payoffs to skill this simple but important question has gone unanswered because conventional models of earnings inequality are based on exceedingly weak measurements of skill by attaching occupational skill measurements to the 1979 2010 current population surveys it becomes possible to adjudicate competing accounts of the changing returns to cognitive creative technical and social skill the well known increase in between occupation inequality is fully explained when such skills are taken into account while returns to schooling prove to be quite stable once correlated changes in workplace skills are parsed out the most important trend however is a precipitous increase in the wage payoff to synthesis critical thinking and related analytic skills the payoff to technical and creative skills often touted in discussions of the third industrial revolution is shown to be less substantial

the strength of a weak agency enforcement of title vii of the 1964 civil rights act and the expansion of state capacity 1965 1971 this article analyzes the anomalous case of early title vii enforcement to challenge the standard political institutional pi account of state capacity title vii prohibited employment discrimination but the equal employment opportunity commission was granted scant enforcement resources yet the early eeoc aggressively enforced and developed title vii to solve the anomaly the authors integrate insights from the literatures on social movements and the sociology of law in the absence of conventional administrative resources apparently weak state agencies can expand their capacity through the legal strategy of broad statutory construction this strategy is more likely with the presence of social movement pressure from below the authors argue that state capacity is a moving target with state and societal actors building on legal as well as administrative resources to construct and transform capacity by reconceptualizing state capacity the authors contribute to nuanced explanations of state policy

the emergence persistence and recent widening of the racial unemployment gap census data show that the ratio of black to white unemployment rates currently in excess of 2 1 was small or nonexistent before 1940 widened dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s and widened again in the 1980s the authors decompose changes in the unemployment gap over the years 1880 1990 to identify the separate contributions of changes in observable worker characteristics and shifts in labor demand nearly all of the widening of the gap during the 1940s and 1950s can be attributed to regional shifts of workers and declining demand in markets where black workers were concentrated after 1970 improvements in the relative educational status of black workers would have narrowed the unemployment gap slightly but demand shifts adverse to black workers more than canceled out these gains

the effect of statistical discrimination on black white wage inequality estimating a model with multiple equilibria this article presents the structural estimation of the parameters of a statistical discrimination model although the model is capable of displaying multiple equilibria an estimation strategy that identifies both the model parameters and the equilibrium selected by the economic agents is developed and empirically implemented a comparison between the selected equilibria and the other potential equilibria reveals that the decline in wage inequality experienced in the u s economy cannot be attributed to changes in the equilibrium selection nonetheless a counterfactual experiment shows that in a color blind society blacks wage would have been on average more than 20 higher

understanding black white wage differentials 1960 1990 understanding black white wage differentials 1960 1990 author s james j heckman thomas m lyons petra e todd source the american economic review vol 90 no 2 papers and proceedings of the one hundred twelfth annual meeting of the american economic association may 2000 pp 344 349 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 117248 accessed 16 08 2008 00 56

patterns of ethnic self employment in time and space evidence from british census microdata the over representation of certain ethnic minority and immigrant groups in self employment is in common with other developed countries a notable feature of the uk labour market compared to the substantial growth in self employment in the 1980s the 1990s saw overall self employment rates plateau despite this some minority groups experienced continued growth whilst others particularly chinese and indian males and pakistani bangladeshi and chinese females saw their self employment rates decline in this paper we use microdata samples from the 1991 and 2001 censuses to investigate the dynamic and spatial patterns of ethnic entrepreneurship using decomposition methods we find that for males from the asian groups changes in observable characteristics associated with an increasing proportion of second generation individuals explain much of the decline in self employment this which is also true of chinese females reflects in part the age structure and educational experiences of the second generation the dynamics of black male and pakistani bangladeshi male and female entrepreneurship are less easy to explain we also find that while there is no evidence of self employment being an enclave phenomenon local economic conditions do affect rates of entrepreneurship for some groups notably pakistanis and bangladeshis

on the decomposition of wage differentials the often used method for decomposing wage differentials into human capital and discrimination components is reformulated so that both t he disadvantage or cost discrimination it imposes on a black or minority wage earner and the advantage or benefit it bestows on a white or majority wage earner can be estimated copyright 1988 by mit press

explaining the black white gap in labor force participation among women heading households for the first time in this century black women are participating in the labor force at lower rates than are white women the black white gap in female labor force participation is driven by those in the severest need of income women heading households the author compares three explanations of the black white gap in labor force participation among female household heads lack of human capital lack of opportunities resulting from industrial restructuring and disarticulation from mainstream institutions as described by theories of the underclass using a representative national sample from the panel study of income dynamics he finds that lower rates of labor force participation among black women heading households are determined by black white differences in human capital as well as by characteristics associated with a breakdown in the processes linking black women to the labor market overall the largest impediments to labor force participation among women heading households are dropping out of high school having a child under the age of six in the household and being a long term welfare recipient

the east german wage curve 1993 1998 abstract this paper examines the east german wage curve using the employment statistics of the federal employment services of germany bundesanstalt fur arbeit over the period 1993 1998 the six waves of this panel include a total of 32 188 684 individual employment spells the statistics comprise the entire population of people gainfully employed and included in the social insurance system these are classified into 114 administrative districts landkreise taking into account the endogeneity of unemployment as well as controlling for region and time effects this paper finds support for the wage curve in east germany the overall unemployment elasticity estimate is 0 15 and is higher for female workers than male workers

the effect of court ordered hiring quotas on the composition and quality of police arguably the most aggressive armative action program ever implemented in the united states was a series of court ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments my best estimate of the eect of court ordered armative action on workforce composition is a 14

the great divide and beyond financial architecture in transition a growing and deepening divide has opened up between transition countries where economic development has taken off and those caught in a vicious cycle of institutional backwardness and macroeconomic instability this great divide is visible in almost every measure of economic performance gdp growth investment government finances growth in inequality general institutional infrastructure and increasingly in measures of financial development strategies for financial development have differed dramatically across countries and over time offering interesting opportunities to study the links between real and financial sector development

poverty in eastern europe in the years of crisis 1978 to 1987 poland hungary and yugoslavia eastern europe experienced an economic crisis between 1978 and 1987 declining income led to substantial increases in poverty rates in poland and yugoslavia while poverty in hungary remained at about the same level as before the crisis in all three countries urban poverty increased as the economic condition of state sector workers deteriorated to a much greater extent than that of agricultural and mixed households the increased poverty was entirely explained by declining income because the overall income distribution did not change or in some cases improved

black white wage convergence the role of public sector wages and employment this paper assesses the relative contribution of the public and private sectors through their employment and wages to the black white wage convergence that occurred in the u s economy over the 1

too many to fail evidence of regulatory forbearance when the banking sector is weak this paper studies bank failures in 21 emerging market countries in the 1990s by using a competing risk hazard model for bank survival we show that a government is less likely to take over or close a failing bank if the banking system is weak this too many to fail effect is robust to controlling for macroeconomic factors financial crises the too big to fail effect domestic financial development and concerns due to systemic risk and information spillovers the paper also shows that the too many to fail effect is stronger for larger banks and when there is a large government budget deficit

prospective deficits and the asian currency crisis this paper argues that a principal cause of the 1997 asian currency crisis was large prospective deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems the expectation that these future deficits would be at least partially financed by seigniorage revenues or an inflation tax on outstanding nominal debt led to a collapse of the fixed exchange rate regimes in asia we articulate this view using a simple model whose key feature is that a speculative attack is inevitable once the present value of future government deficits rises we present empirical evidence in support of the key assumptions underlying our interpretation of the crisis