Social scientists are often interested in assessing relative changes between two groups over time, for example, the convergence of black-white wages from 1940 to 1990. In such situations, we need a control group for both treatment groups to remove biases resulting from time trends and unobserved...

We present a detailed decomposition method and provide a Stata estimator to assess relative changes between two groups over time in a synthetic cohort analysis. Using the convergence of black–white wage gap between 1960 and 1970 as an example, we show that education accounts for 73% of the...

Department: Economics.

In the economics literature, labor market segregation is typically assumed to arise either from prejudice (<link rid="b7">Becker 1971</link>) or from group differences in human capital accumulation (<link rid="b9">Benabou 1993</link>; <link rid="b23">Durlauf 2006</link>; <link rid="b27">Fryer 2006</link>). Many sociological studies, by contrast, consider social network structure as...

In this endogenous growth model, a minimum efficient scale of production and workers' home-to-work travel costs combine to give firms monopsony power, and this monopsony power leads to slower growth. Monopsony drives the wage below the marginal product of labor. This lower wage leads to lower...

Since China promulgated new minimum wage regulations in 2004, the magnitude and frequency of changes in the minimum wage have been substantial, both over time and across jurisdictions. This paper uses county-level minimum wage panel data and a longitudinal household survey from 16 representative...

This paper presents evidence that since 1980, relative to other immigrants, the earnings of Taiwanese immigrants have grown rapidly as they assimilate into the U.S. economy. Our estimates indicate that the rising returns to education, pre-migration experience and hours worked per week play...