with: Erik Hurst

Authors: Erik Hurst, Yona Rubinstein, Kazuatsu Shimizu

Time & Location

30 Mar, 9:30 am – 10:30 pm
e61 Institute, Level 3/17-21 Bellevue Street Surry Hills NSW 2010, Australia

There are limited spaces available.

About the event

In this paper, we develop a task-based model of occupational choice to identify and quantify the effect of discrimination and aggregate task prices on the Black-White wage gap over time. At the heart of our framework is the idea that the size and nature of racial barriers faced by Black workers varies by the task requirements of each job. We define a new task that measures the extent to which individuals interact with others as part of their job. Using both the structure of our model, detailed micro data from the Census/ACS and the NLSY, and regional variation in survey-based discrimination measures, we highlight that the racial gap in this new task measure is a good proxy for the extent of taste-based discrimination in the economy. Our structurally estimated model and reduced form evidence attribute the fast decline in the observed Black-White gap in wages between 1960 to 1990 to a notable drop in labor market taste-based discrimination and attributes the stagnation in the Black-White gap in pay since then to the notable increase in the wage premium to Abstract tasks.