Why do minority men earn less? A study of wage differentials among the highly educated
Abstract
We estimate wage gaps using nonparametric matching methods and detailed measures of
field of study for university graduates. We find a modest portion of the wage gap
is the consequence of measurement error in the Census education measure. For Hispanic
and Asian men, the remaining gap is attributable to premarket factors - primarily
differences in formal education and English language proficiency. For black men, only
about one-quarter of the wage gap is explained by these same factors. For a subsample
of black men born outside the South to parents with some college education, these
factors do account for the entire wage gap. © 2006 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2000Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1162/rest.88.2.300Publication Info
Black, D; Haviland, A; Sanders, S; & Taylor, L (2006). Why do minority men earn less? A study of wage differentials among the highly educated.
Review of Economics and Statistics, 88(2). pp. 300-313. 10.1162/rest.88.2.300. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2000.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Seth G. Sanders
Professor of Economics
Professor Sanders specializes in the fields of economics and public policy. His research
focuses specifically on four different lines of study, which include the trends of
race and gender in relation to earnings among the highly educated; the effects of
extreme economic changes on workers and families; the performance of gay and lesbian
families within the economy; and the economic consequences of teenage childbearing.
He has received numerous grants for his research, including several from the
This author no longer has a Scholars@Duke profile, so the information shown here reflects
their Duke status at the time this item was deposited.

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