Black-White Earnings Ratios Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Importance of Labor Market Dropouts

Charles Brown

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1984, vol. 99, issue 1, 31-44

Abstract: Published median earnings of wage and salary workers by race and sex are based on distributions that exclude those without earnings and those not employed as wage and salary workers at the time of the survey. It has been argued that the changing importance of these exclusions, rather than any improvement in the distribution of offered wages for blacks, accounts for the apparent increase in black-white relative median earnings. This paper presents a new method for correcting the published medians for such censoring. The apparent improvement in relative earnings is reduced but not eliminated by the correction.

Date: 1984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (73)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1885719 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Black-White Earnings Ratios Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Importance of Labor Market Dropouts (1981)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:99:y:1984:i:1:p:31-44.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().