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Gender Differentials in the Labor Market

出版	New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2004
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=QNj6HAAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Widespread gender wage differentials, persistent even after conditioning on characteristics that proxy productivity, have been considered a possible indication of prejudice against women in the labor market. The problem with this interpretation is that the observables used to proxy productivity are not a complete description of actual productivity. Therefore, this evidence is not enough to assess whether gender wage differentials are due to labor market discrimination or to unobserved productivity differences. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a solution for this identification problem by developing and estimating a search model of the labor market with employer taste discrimination. In the model, workers search for jobs and employers search to fill vacancies. Upon meeting, they observe a match-specific value of productivity and engage in bargaining to determine wages. Prejudiced employers receive disutility from employing women. Matching and bargaining imply that the existence of some positive proportion of prejudiced employers also generates wage discrimination for women working with unprejudiced employers. In the first part of the dissertation, a version of the model is estimated on Current Population Survey data. The identification strategy exploits a distinctive feature of the observed earnings distribution of women with respect to men: observations are more concentrated in the left tail and the density to the left of the mode is quite flat. The proposed explanation of this shape is that it is generated by a mixture between two earnings distributions: one at prejudiced employers, decreasing right after the truncation point because of the very high reservation value, and another at unprejudiced employers, increasing above the truncation point because the reservation match value is lower. Maximum likelihood estimates show that both discrimination and productivity differences are present in the labor market for white college graduates. In the second part of the dissertation the model is extended to allow for free-entry of employers. The objective is to understand if employers heterogeneity survives even if free-entry is present. Ex-ante preferences are kept exogenous but the proportion of employers with given tastes for discrimination is obtained endogenously.