In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray argue that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy in which differences in wages (including differences across race and gender) are explained by differences in cognitive ability. In this paper we test their claim for wages conditional on occupation using a...

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray argue that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy in which differences in wages (including differences across race and gender) are explained by differences in cognitive ability. In this paper we test their claim for wages conditional on occupation using a...

This paper presents and extends the index function model of Karl Pearson (1901) that underlies all recent models in labor econometrics. In this framework, censored, truncated and discrete random variables are interpreted as the manifestation of various sampling schemes for underlying index...