While the lack of gender and racial diversity in economics in academia (for students and professors) is well-established, less is known about the overall placement and earnings of economists by gender and race. Understanding demand-side factors is important, as improvements in the supply side by diversifying the pipeline alone may not be enough to improve equity in the profession. Using the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) linked to Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) jobs data, we examine placements and earnings for economists working in the U.S. after receiving a PhD by gender and race. We find enormous dispersion in pay for economists within and across sectors that grows over time. Female PhD economists earn about 12 percent less than their male colleagues on average; Black PhD economists earn about 15 percent less than their white counterparts on average; and overall underrepresented minority PhD economists earn about 8 percent less than their white counterparts. These pay disparities are attenuated in some sectors and when controlling for rank of PhD granting institution and employer.
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Is the Gender Pay Gap Largest at the Top?
December 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-61
No: it is at least as large at bottom percentiles of the earnings distribution. Conditional quantile regressions reveal that while the gap at top percentiles is largest among the most-educated, the gap at bottom percentiles is largest among the least-educated. Gender differences in labor supply create more pay inequality among the least-educated than they do among the most-educated. The pay gap has declined throughout the distribution since 2006, but it declined more for the most-educated women. Current economics-of-gender research focuses heavily on the top end; equal emphasis should be placed on mechanisms driving gender inequality for noncollege-educated workers.
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Comparing Earnings Outcome Differences Between All Graduates and Title IV Graduates
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-19
Recently, two public data products have been released that publish earnings outcomes for college graduates by program of study and institution: Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes and College Scorecard, from the Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Education, respectively. While the earnings data underlying the data products is similar, persons eligible for the frames of the two products is different, with College Scorecard restricted to only students that receive Title IV aid. This paper documents how these differences in the population studied affect the published earnings outcomes. I show that at an institution, of the institutions in my sample, an average of sixty percent of baccalaureate graduates receive Title IV aid, and that the lower the coverage, the large the difference in earnings measurement. Additionally, I show that short-run earnings outcomes are very similar for these two samples, while longer-run outcomes (10 years after graduation) are significantly lower for the Title IV population. I also show that program ranking can change significantly when considering the Title IV population rather than the entire graduate population.
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How long do early career decisions follow women? The impact of industry and firm size history on the gender and motherhood wage gaps
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-05
We add to the gender wage gap literature by considering how characteristics of past employers are correlated with current wages and whether differences between the work histories of men and women are related to the persistent gender wage gap. Our hypothesis is that women have spent less time over the course of their careers in higher paying industries and have less job- and industry-specific human capital and that these characteristics are correlated with male-female earnings differences. Additionally, we expect that difference in the work histories between women with children and childless women might help explain the observed motherhood wage gap. We use unique administrative employer history data to conduct a standard decomposition exercise to determine the impact of differences in observable job history characteristics on the gender and motherhood wage gaps. We find that industry work history has two opposing effects on both these wage gaps. The distribution of work experience across industries contributes to increasing the wage gaps, but the share of experience spent in the industry sector of the current job works to decrease earnings differences.
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Who Scars the Easiest? College Quality and the Effects of Graduating into a Recession
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-47
Graduating from college into a recession is associated with earnings losses, but less is known about how these effects vary across colleges. Using restricted-use data from the National Survey of College Graduates, we study how the effects of graduating into worse economic conditions vary over college quality in the context of the Great Recession. We find that earnings losses are concentrated among graduates from relatively high-quality colleges. Key mechanisms include substitution out of the labor force and into graduate school, decreased graduate degree completion, and differences in the economic stability of fields of study between graduates of high- and low-quality colleges.
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Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-32
Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor's degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools. Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.
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A Tale of Two Fields? STEM Career Outcomes
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-53
Is the labor market for US researchers experiencing the best or worst of times? This paper analyzes the market for recently minted Ph.D. recipients using supply-and-demand logic and data linking graduate students to their dissertations and W2 tax records. We also construct a new dissertation-industry 'relevance' measure, comparing dissertation and patent text and linking patents to assignee firms and industries. We find large disparities across research fields in placement (faculty, postdoc, and industry positions), earnings, and the use of specialized human capital. Thus, it appears to simultaneously be a good time for some fields and a bad time for others.
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The impact of manufacturing credentials on earnings and the probability of employment
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-15
This paper examines the labor market returns to earning industry-certified credentials in the manufacturing sector. Specifically, we are interested in estimating the impact of a manufacturing credential on wages, probability of employment, and probability of employment specifically in the manufacturing sector post credential attainment. We link students who earned manufacturing credentials to their enrollment and completion records, and then further link them to their IRS tax records for earnings and employment (Form W2 and 1040) and to the American Community Survey and decennial census for demographic information. We present earnings trajectories for workers with credentials by type of credential, industry of employment, age, race and ethnicity, gender, and state. To obtain a more causal estimate of the impact of a credential on earnings, we implement a coarsened exact matching strategy to compare outcomes between otherwise similar people with and without a manufacturing credential. We find that the attainment of a manufacturing industry credential is associated with higher earnings and a higher likelihood of labor market participation when we compare attainers to a group of non-attainers who are otherwise similar.
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Worker Advancement in the Low-Wage Labor Market: The Importance of Good Jobs
July 2003
Working Paper Number:
tp-2003-08
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The Gender Pay Gap and Its Determinants Across the Human Capital Distribution
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-31R
This paper links American Community Survey data and postsecondary transcript records to examine how the gender pay gap varies across the distribution of education credentials for a sample of 2003-2013 graduates. Although recent literature emphasizes gender inequality among the most-educated, we find a smaller gender pay gap at higher education levels. Field-of-degree and occupation effects explain most of the gap among top bachelor's graduates, while work hours and unobserved channels matter more for less-competitive bachelor's, associate, and certificate graduates. We develop a novel decomposition of the child penalty to examine the role of children in explaining these results.
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High-Growth Entrepreneurship
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-53
We study the patterns and determinants of job creation for a large cohort of start-up firms. Analysis of the universe of U.S. employers reveals strong persistence in employment size from firm birth to age seven, with a small fraction of firms accounting for most employment at both ages, patterns that are little explained by finely disaggregated industry controls or amount of finance. Linking to data from the Survey of Business Owners on characteristics of 54,700 founders of 36,400 start-ups, and defining 'high growth' as the top 5% of firms in the size distribution at age zero and seven, we find that women have a 30% lower probability of founding high-growth entrepreneurships at both ages. A similar gap for African-Americans at start-up disappears by age seven. Other differences with respect to race, ethnicity, and nativity are modest. Founder age is initially positively associated with high growth probability but the profile flattens after seven years and even becomes slightly negative. The education profile is initially concave, with advanced degree recipients no more likely to found high growth firms than high school graduates, but the former catch up to those with bachelor's degrees by firm age seven, while the latter do not. Most other relationships of high growth with founder characteristics are highly persistent over time. Prior business ownership is strongly positively associated, and veteran experience negatively associated, with high growth. A larger founding team raises the probability of high growth, while diversity (by gender, age, race/ethnicity, or nativity) either lowers the probability or has little effect. More start-up capital raises the high-growth propensity of firms founded by a sole proprietor, women, minorities, immigrants, veterans, novice entrepreneurs, and those who are younger or with less education. Perhaps surprisingly, women, minorities, and those with less education tend to choose high growth industries, but fewer of them achieve high growth compared to their industry peers.
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