Glass Ceilings or Glass Doors? Wage Disparity Within and Between Firms

Abstract

We investigate whether immigrant and minority workers’ poor access to high-wage jobs— that is, glass ceilings— is attributable to poor access to jobs in high-wage …rms, a phenomenon we call glass doors. Our analysis uses linked employer-employee data to measure mean- and quantile-wage di¤erentials of immigrants and ethnic minorities, both within and across …rms. We …nd that glass ceilings exist for some immigrant groups, and that they are driven in large measure by glass doors. For some immigrant groups, the sorting of these workers across …rms accounts for as much as half of the economy-wide wage disparity they face.glass ceilings, wage di¤erentials, immigration, visible minorities, quantile regression, linked employer-employee data