Single women in the U.S. dominated the female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task oriented and payment was frequently by the...

Although women make up nearly half the U.S. workforce, most studies of earnings inequality focus on men. This is at least in part because of the complexity of modeling both the decision to work (i.e., the extensive margin) and the level of earnings conditional on work (the intensive margin). In...

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 quot;directquot; effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and...

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 these two sources of bias are...

The human capital explanation of sex differences in wages is that women intend to work in the labor market more intermittently than men, and therefore invest less. This lower investment leads to lower wages and wage growth. The alternative "feedback" hypothesis consistent with the same facts is...

Using Census and Current Population Survey data spanning 1959 through 1999, we assess the relative contributions of two factors to the decline in the gender wage gap: changes across cohorts in the relative slopes of men%u2019s and women%u2019s age-earnings profiles, versus changes in relative...

Taken as a whole, the literature on black-white wage inequality suggests that racial gaps in potential wages are much larger among men than women, and further that one can accurately assess black-white gaps in potential wages among women without accounting for black-white differences in patterns...

Sex-related wage differentials are almost universal. Economists traditionally tend to attribute a major fraction of the differential to the difference in on-the-job training. This difference is in turn often explained by the lower profitability of this investment for women who plan to interrupt...

Has economic progress increased the relative earnings of females to males over the long run? Evidence on trends in the earnings gap for the last four decades appears to run counter to this hypothesis. Numerous data sources are used in this paper to piece together a 170-year history of the...

We ask whether women's decisions to be in the labor force may be affected by the decisions of other women in ways not captured by standard models. We develop a model that augments the simple neoclassical framework by introducing relative income concerns into women's (or families') utility...