Supervisory and monitoring costs are explored to understand aspects of occupational segregation by sex. Around the turn of this century 47 percent of all female manufacturing operatives were paid by the piece, but only 13 percent of the males were. There were very few males and females employed...

Research on sex differences in humans documents gender differences in sensory, motor and spatial aptitudes. These aptitudes, as captured by Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) codes, predict the occupational choices of men and women in the directions indicated by this research. We simulate...

We contrast the spatial mismatch hypothesis with what we term the racial mismatch hypothesis - that the problem is not a lack of jobs, per se, where blacks live, but a lack of jobs where blacks live into which blacks are hired. We first report new evidence on the spatial mismatch hypothesis,...

We use detailed location information from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database to develop new evidence on the effects of spatial mismatch on the relative earnings of Black workers in large US cities. We classify workplaces by the size of the pay premiums they offer in a...

In this paper we explore the effects of labor demand shifts and population adjustments across metropolitan areas on the employment and earnings of various demographic groups during the 1980s. Results show that, although earnings and employment deteriorated for less-education and black males in...

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants...

This paper presents evidence that job suburbanization caused significant declines in black employment from 1970 to 2000. I document that, conditional on detailed job characteristics, blacks are less likely than whites to work in suburban establishments, and this spatial segregation is stable...

Studies of the earnings of union workers have consistently shown that they earn considerably more than nonunion workers. This paper considers whether part of this observed union/nonunion differential is due to unions organizing high paying primary sector jobs. We extend our earlier work on the...

This paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers' need to motivate workers. In order to elicit effort from their workers, employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage. This changes fundamentally the character of labor markets. The modelis applied to a wide...

This paper estimates the contribution of human capital, measured using both educational attainment and test performance, to the Black-white earnings gap in three separate samples of men spanning 1966 through 2017. There are three main findings. First, the magnitude of reductions in the...