Equality through exposure to imports? International trade and the racial wage gap

Azim Essaji, Gregory Sweeney and Alexandros Kotsopoulos

Journal of Economic Policy Reform, 2010, vol. 13, issue 4, 313-323

Abstract: A key implication of Becker’s (1957) work on discrimination is that greater product market competition can reduce employment discrimination generally, and discriminatory wage gaps in particular. Using US data on manufacturing wages and import exposure, we explore whether increased competition, in the form of a heightened exposure to imports, reduces the racial wage gap. Our findings support Becker’s contention. We find that import exposure helped narrow the racial wage gap by about 1.4 percentage points between 1983 and 1993. The effect is especially pronounced among the most disadvantaged: unskilled Southern workers. For them, import exposure helped reduce racial wage disparities by 2.2 percentage points.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17487870.2010.523968 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:jecprf:v:13:y:2010:i:4:p:313-323

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GPRE20

DOI: 10.1080/17487870.2010.523968

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Policy Reform is currently edited by Dr Judith Clifton

More articles in Journal of Economic Policy Reform from Taylor and Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().