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...

The major contribution of this paper is ending a new and flexible way to measure the effects of selection on log-wages. In this context, we offer a general approach to performing decomposition analysis when selection effects are present. We call the difference between unconditional and...