We use queuing-related behavior as an instrument for assessing the social appeal of alternative cultural norms. Specifically, we study the behavior of rational and sophisticated individuals who stand in a given queue waiting to be served, and who, in order to speed up the process, consider...

We set up a model with search and matching frictions to understand the effects of employment and wage policies, as well as nepotism in hiring in the public sector, on unemployment and rent seeking. Conditional on inefficiently high public-sector wages, more nepotism in public-sector hiring...

Korea is known not only for rapid economic growth but also relatively low wage inequality. It is one of the few countries in which wage inequality decreased during the 1980s, though in recent years wage inequality has increased. This paper studies what factors contributed to the changes in wage...

This paper joins discussions on normalized regression and decomposition equations in devising a simple and general algorithm for obtaining the normalized regression and applying it to the Oaxaca decomposition. This resolves the invariance problem in the detailed Oaxaca decomposition. An...

We analyze four methods to measure unexplained gaps in mean outcomes: three decompositions based on the seminal work of Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) and an approach involving a seemingly naive regression that includes a group indicator variable. Our analysis yields two principal findings. We...

Taking as our point of departure a model proposed by David Card (2001), we suggest new methods for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market. Card's method disaggregates the labor population into skill categories, which procedure entails some loss of information....

This paper shows how difficult it is to study the roles of discrimination and unobserved skills when studying changes in racial and gender wage gaps over time by examining merits and shortcomings of a popular decomposition method by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991). The JMP method shows that wage...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial mixtures).

Relative employment conditions have changed across the public and private sectors in Britain over the last decade with the former becoming a more attractive earnings option. Using new linked employee-employer data for Britain in 2004, this paper shows that, on average, full-time male public...

This study aimed to identify the major factors underlying the large discrepancy in poverty levels between two Brazilian racial groups: whites and Afro-Brazilians. We performed an Oaxaca-Blinder-type decomposition for nonlinear regressions in order to quantify the extent to which differences in...