We propose a new approach to analyzing gender differences in wages. This approach identifies several alternative explanatory mechanisms to account for the sorting of women and men into different types of jobs that offer different levels of reward. ...

This article estimates the impact that young women's ex ante preferences for future labor force attachment have on their human capital accumulation and pay. Empirical evidence from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women aged 14 to 24 in 1968 supports the human capital hypothesis that...

This paper examines methods of decomposing a difference in levels between groups for a dependent variable such as income. Applied to regression equations, this technique estimates the contribution to the difference from divergent characteristics and divergent rates of converting characteristics...