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Title: Cross-Cohort Changes in the Returns to Schooling and Early Work Experiences: Cronsequences on the Gender Wage Differential

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2006

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Abstract: This study examines how the returns to wages of early work and schooling experiences changed for young men and women in the United States over the latter half of the twentieth century. Our analysis focuses on the experiences of young men and women from two different birth cohortsone group that was of high school age during the second half of the 1960s and a second that grew to young adulthood in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We pay particular attention to how the differences across cohorts in human capital accumulation vary by gender and how these differences affected their subsequent wage attainment. We present an econometric framework to consistently estimate the returns to youths schooling and early work experiences. This framework attempts to deal with both the endogeneity of schooling and various types of work experiences and selection bias in our wage data. Using these estimates, we adapt the Juhn, Murphy, Pierce (1993) wage decomposition framework to assess separately the roles of across-cohort changes in the observed and unobserved skill distributions and of changes over time in the returns to these skills, towards explaining the convergence of the gender wage gap.

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Authors: Hotz, Joseph; McKee, Douglas; Bacolod, Marigee

Conference Name: Population Association of America Annual Meetings

Publisher Location: Los Angeles, California

Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

Countries: United States