Gender Differences in the Cost of Displacement: An Empirical Test of Discrimination in the Labor Market
利用失业工人数据，区分人力资本与歧视两种理论对性别工资差异的解释，发现女性失业后工资损失更大，支持歧视假说。
There are two competing explanations of why women workers earn less than men with equivalent education, work experience, and job tenure: the human capital explanation and the discrimination explanation. The human capital explanation argues that sex differences in human capital investment which arise from sex differences in expectations surrounding labor force participation account for the wage differential. Women workers are expected to invest less in jobspecific human capital than otherwise comparable men workers because women expect to spend less time on the job. Furthermore, even for men and women workers with equal ex post levels of job tenure and/or work experience, women have invested less in onthe-job training because their a priori expectations of job tenure and/or work experience were less than those of men who now have the same tenure and/or experience. Therefore, in this view, women workers earn less than comparable men because they have invested less in specific human capital. Women earn less because they are less productive; the sex-wage differential is economically efficient. The discrimination explanation argues that sex differences in labor market opportunities, that is, sex discrimination in the labor market, account for the sex-wage differential. In this view, women workers earn less than comparable men because they are the victims of sex discrimination in the labor market. Women do not earn less because they are less productive; the sex-wage differential is economically inefficient. While the economic implications of these two explanations of the sex-wage differential are enormously different, both explanations are consistent with empirical studies simply because both resort to nonmeasurables to explain the sex-wage differential: empirical studies cannot measure directly either discrimination or job-specific human capital. Therefore, the problem with these two competing explanations of the sex-wage differential is that neither has been empirically sorted from the other. Both explanations are consistent with data which show a wage differential by sex after controlling for education, work experience, and job tenure. Newly available data on displaced workers provide an opportunity to empirically disentangle these two competing explanations of the sex-wage differential. Displaced workers are workers who have lost their jobs either because their workplaces have closed or because they were permanently laid off due to slack demand for the outputs of their firms. Displaced workers represent a special case of worker mobility. Unlike voluntary job movers, that is, workers who have voluntarily quit their prior jobs, the job mobility of displaced workers is not the result of their own expectations that better jobs are available. A worker who voluntarily changes jobs does so because there is another job which offers higher wages (or other improvements in the conditions of employment). The worker moves precisely because his or her productivity (and wages) is higher on the subsequent job. The wage change is endogenous. Unlike workers who are fired or involuntarily laid off because their personal productivity is lower than that of other tDiscussants: Rebecca Blank, Princeton University; Elyce Rotella, Indiana University.