Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past three decades. However, over this period the racial gap in well-being has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well-being...

This paper explores secular changes in women?s pay relative to men?s pay. It shows how the human capital model predicts a smaller gender wage gap as male-female lifetime work expectations become more similar. The model explains why relative female wages rose almost unabated from 1890 to the...

A small number of recent empirical studies for several countries has reported the intriguing finding that the ?advantage? previously enjoyed by men in respect of training incidence and reported in earlier work in the literature has been reversed. The present paper explores the sources of the...

The IAB employment subsample is now available for researchers in a third, anonymised version. Following the so-called basic file and the regional file from the IAB employment subsample, which encompassed the years 1975 to 1990, the actualized version of the basic file covers now the years 1975...

This paper examines differences in China's ethnic majority and minority patterns of labor force participation and decomposes these differences into treatment and endowment effects using the technique developed by Borooah and Iyer (2005). Population census data are used to estimate...

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is...

This paper provides unique evidence of a reversal of gender gaps in cognitive development in early childhood. We find steep caste and gender gradients and few substantive changes once children enter school. The gender gap, however, reverses its sign for the upper caste, with girls performing...

We model a hiring process in which the candidate is evaluated sequentially by two agents of the firm who each observe an independent signal of the candidate's productivity. We introduce the potential for taste-based discrimination and characterize how one agent's private valuation of the...

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand how earnings aredistributed across the population. In the years since Mincer’s seminal work, he as well as hisstudents and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching importantconclusions about a whole array...