Never-married motherhood is associated with worse educational outcomes for children. But this association may reflect other factors that also determine family structure, rather than causal effects. We use incarceration rates for men as instrumental variables in estimating the effect of...

We use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women. This analysis yields evidence of biases in OLS estimates of wage equations for white and black women, some of which are detected only when the two sources of bias are...

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However,...

This paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males. Longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage, and that cross-sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile. Data from a company personnel file...

We explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross-sectional relationships between marriage, motherhood, and wages. We find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the "direct" effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and tenure);...

This paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups, introduced by Oaxaca (1973), to a theoretical model of employers' discriminatory behavior. It is shown that, conditional on different assumptions about employers' discriminatory tastes, Oaxaca's...

Living wage ordinances typically mandate that businesses under contract with a city or, in some cases, receiving assistance from a city, must pay their workers a wage sufficient to support a family financially. We estimate the effects of these ordinances on wages, hours, and employment in cities...

This paper provides evidence on a wide set of margins along which labor markets can adjust in response to increases in the minimum wage, including wages, hours, employment, and ultimately labor income. Not surprisingly, the evidence indicates that low-wage workers are most strongly affected,...

This paper explores the consequences of age discrimination in the work-place by analyzing self-reports of discrimination in the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men, for the period 1966-80. Workers with positive reports were much more likely to separate from their employer and less likely...

One potential method to increase the success of female graduate students in economics is to encourage mentoring relationships between these students and female faculty members, via increased hiring of female faculty, or having female faculty serve as dissertation chairs for female students. This...