Early-Career Work Experience and Gender Wage Differentials.

The authors estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career. This array fully characterizes past employment experience, regardless of how sporadic it has been. Their model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form. The authors find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject their model. Furthermore, they find that 12 percent of the male-female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.