Despite sustained economic growth at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean still faces high inequality and weak indicators of well-being among certain population groups. Women, people of African ancestry, and indigenous peoples are often at...

This paper surveys gender and ethnic wage gaps in 18 Latin American countries, decomposing differences using matching comparisons as a non-parametric alternative to the Blinder-Oaxaca (BO) decomposition. It is found that men earn 9-27 percent more than women, with high cross-country...

Returns to labor for workers with similar endowments of productive characteristics in Ecuador are influenced by two characteristics that, arguably, should play no role on the determination of wages: gender and ethnicity. This paper analyzes wage gaps due to both characteristics in Ecuador for...

This paper shows how difficult it is to study the roles of discrimination and unobserved skills when studying changes in racial and gender wage gaps over time by examining merits and shortcomings of a popular decomposition method by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991). The JMP method shows that wage...

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...

We examine several functional and numerical measures of wage discrimination in the spirit of the Lorenz curve. The First Order discrimination curve is based on the comparison of the wage CDF of two subpopulations. Three different Second Order discrimination curves are derived to refine the first...