Immigrant experience: the relation between skin color and pay

There is considerable evidence of discriminatory treatment of immigrants in employment and access to housing, and the author’s research suggests that factors such as height and darkness of skin may influence how immigrants are treated.Immigrants ; Discrimination in employment ; Discrimination in housing

Compensating Differentials for Gender-Specific Job Injury Risks

Women have largely been excluded from analyses of compensating differentials for job risk since they are predominantly employed in safer, white-collar occupations. New data reveal that their injury experience is considerable. One-third of the total injury and illness cases with days away from work accrue to female workers. Adjusted for employment, women are 71 percent as likely as men to experience an injury or illness. As one would predict on theoretical grounds, these risks generate compensating differentials. Based on gender-specific injury incidence rates for both industry and occupation, I find strong evidence of compensating wage differentials for the job risk faced by female workers. Furthermore, all women -- not only women in the riskier blue-collar jobs -- receive a substantial and statistically significant premium for bearing job risk. Occupational risk has a larger impact on the wage rate than industry risk, and when both risk measures are included in the wage equation, only occupational risk is significant. In contrast, there is a negative relation between risk and earnings for white-collar men. This is a puzzling finding, since the use of occupation specific incidence rates reduces the measurement error that may result from imputing industry risk averages to men in safer white-collar occupations. In contrast to the estimates based on gender specific risk measures, estimates based on the BLS industry rate fail to reveal evidence of a compensating differential for job risk faced by women. Imputing this measure of overall industry risk to female workers apparently results in measurement error too great to yield reliable estimates of the wage-risk trade-off for female workers. The wage-risk trade-off and the implicit value of an injury or illness are of a magnitude similar to that found in this study for male blue-collar workers. Since women comprise over 45 percent of the labor force, it is comforting to discover that, at least with regard to job risk, women and blue-collar men face a wage-determination process yielding similar compensation for job risk

The New Labor Market for Lawyers: Will Female Lawyers Still Earn Less?

To examine the magnitude and source of the gender pay disparity among lawyers, this paper uses data from a large national survey reporting individual information for 1990 and 1993 on a wide array of work related and personal characteristics. The data show a large earnings shortfall for female lawyers earning their J.D. before 1990, even after controlling for differences in work history, hours worked, type of employer, and family characteristics. In contrast, female lawyers earning their J.D. between 1990 and 1993 earn more than their male counterparts. By examining the sources of the gender pay gap among the older cohort it is possible to draw inferences for the younger cohort on the likelihood that this female earnings advantage will persist. The findings of this paper suggest that although the gender disparity will narrow as women gain experience in the legal profession, a gap due to family status is likely to persist. First, men receive a large premium to being married. To the extent this premium derives from specialization, women lawyers may likewise benefit from marital specialization as more women have spouses with supporting careers. But the evidence from the younger cohort does not bode well, as traditional patterns of spousal employment status persist. Second, although marital status and children do not directly affect women\u27s earnings, they do influence hours worked. Finally, one cannot rule out the existence of discrimination because there is a large unexplained gender pay disparity that remains even after controlling for extensive work-related and personal characteristics

Allocation of Time and Human Energy and Its Effects on Productivity

The supply of effort on the job has been virtually ignored as a component of the effective supply of labour. Typically, labour supply models assume the worker chooses the utility-maximizing number of hours to supply on the job as a function of a fixed wage rate which is independent of the worker\u27s effort. This paper generalizes the worker\u27s choice problem to include the situation in which the worker\u27s income depends on effort exerted on the job as well as time spent on the job

Gender, Race, and Job Satisfaction of Law Graduates

Studies typically find that lawyers have high job satisfaction and that women are not less satisfied than are men. But racial differences as well as gender differences by race or ethnicity in satisfaction may be masked because most lawyers identify as racially White. To examine whether job satisfaction differs by race and whether gender and race/ethnicity have an intersectional relation to job satisfaction, I use data on nearly 13,000 law graduates drawn from six waves of the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) conducted between 2003 and 2019. The NSCG uniquely provides a large enough sample to examine intersectionality in job satisfaction of law graduates as well as to compare satisfaction of lawyers to those employed in other occupations. Job satisfaction is strikingly low among Black women and Asian women law graduates. Asian women lawyers have satisfaction similar to White men lawyers but substantially lower satisfaction if not employed as a lawyer. Black women have substantially lower satisfaction in either employment situation. The lower satisfaction of Asian and Black women law graduates is not due to differences in personal characteristics, family status or background, job characteristics, or differences in values

Profiling the New Immigrant Worker: The Effects of Skin Color and Height

Using data from the New Immigrant Survey 2003, this paper shows that skin color and height affect wages among new lawful immigrants to the U.S. controlling for education, English language proficiency, occupation in source country, family background, ethnicity, race, and country of birth. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17 percent more than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color. Taller immigrants have higher wages, but weight does not affect wages. Controls for extensive current labor market characteristics that may be influenced by discrimination do not eliminate the negative effect of darker skin color on wages

Demand for a Jury Trial and the Selection of Cases for Trial

This paper uses a unique data set to examine how parties in civil litigation choose whether to demand a jury trial or to waive this right and whether trial forum influences the probability of trial versus settlement. Plaintiffs are more likely to demand trial by jury when juries are relativety more favorable to plaintiffs in similar cases and jury trials are relatively less costly than bench trials. Cases in which jury trials are demanded are 5.5 percentage points more ikely to settle without a trial than cases in which jury trials are waived. This differential settlement rate by potential trial forum suggests that tried cases are not a random sample of the set of legal disputes, so observed similarities between bench and jury verdicts may result from case selection effects

Education Match and Job Match

Using a new data set, this paper gives evidence in support of the intuitive notion that overqualified workers are less satisfied with their jobs and are more likely to quit. However, training time is inversely related to overqualification, which suggests why such seeming mismatches occur and may in fact be optimal

How Opting Out Among Women With Elite Education Contributes to Social Inequality

This paper, written for the 2013−2014 Symposium of the Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality, expands on my research showing that women who are graduates of elite institutions have lower labor market activity than their counterparts who are graduates of non-selective institutions. I provide new statistics on the relation between status of undergraduate institution and family background, likelihood of earning a professional or graduate degree, earnings, and trends in opting out. These data show that the gap in labor market activity on the basis of educational status was largely unchanged between 2003 and 2010 and that graduation from an elite post-baccalaureate program does not eliminate the pay gap between graduates of elite and non-selective institutions. I discuss what the greater opting out of women with elite education implies for social inequality on two dimensions: whether increased workplace flexibility would lead to greater retention of women in high-profile careers and competition for limited slots in elite institutions. Because graduates of elite institutions have preferred workplace options and also report not working because they do not need to work, enhanced workplace flexibility is not likely to increase retention. Women graduates of elite institutions who opt out of the labor market displace someone else who may have used their degree to stay in the labor market and have more time to support enrichment activities for their children, further contributing to inter-generational inequality

Efficient Deterrence of Workplace Sexual Harassment

Although sexual harassment imposes costs on both victims and organizations, it is also costly for organizations to reduce sexual harassment. Legislation, education, training, and litigation have all been unsuccessful in eradicating workplace sexual harassment. My proposal is to establish financial incentives of sufficient magnitude to incentivize organizations to eliminate sexual harassment. The key challenge is in monetizing the harm caused by sexual harassment. I propose a new approach that draws on my research, which calculated the risk of sexual harassment by gender, industry, and age based on charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Using these risk measures, I established that workers receive a hazard pay premium for exposure to risk of sexual harassment. This premium reflects the higher pay workers need to work in a more hostile work environment and monetizes the aggregate societal evaluation of exposure to risk of an abhorred workplace behavior. Using my estimates of the pay premium, I calculate a value that I refer to as the “value of statistical harassment” (VSH). This amount is $7.6 million, far greater than the current federal cap of$300,000 for the largest firms. Raising the damages cap on awards to this level would provide organizations with the necessary financial incentive for efficient deterrence