We extend Becker's model of discrimination by allowing firms to have discriminatory and favoring preferences simultaneously. We draw the two-preference parallel for the marginal firm, illustrate the implications for wage differentials, and consider the implied long-run equilibrium. In the...

Using a sample of professional baseball players from 1871-2007, this paper aims at analyzing a longstanding empirical observation that married men earn significantly more than their single counterparts holding all else equal (the marriage premium). Baseball is a unique case study because it has...

This paper estimates the gender wage gap and its composition in China's urban labor market using the 2009 survey data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies. Several estimation and decomposition methods have been used and compared. First, we examine the gender wage gap using ordinary least square...

The effect of marriage on productivity and wages has been long debated. A difficulty in estimating the effect of marriage on productivity is the lack of data that contain measures of both marital status and exogenous productivity. We fill this gap by using a sample of professional athletes from...

While researchers have long held that discrimination cannot endure in an increasingly competitive environment, there has been little work testing this dynamic process. This paper tests the hypothesis (based on Becker 1957) that increased competition resulting from globalization in the 1980s...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens' approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that "women and men shall...

This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey, a new international dataset of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich, previously unavailable, set of factors in the...

A gender differential in wages is considered to be discriminatory if the differential cannot be explained by gender differences in productivity. Numerous studies have been performed to measure the extent of gender wage discrimination in countries across the world, and most report a substantial...