Estimating the Variance of Wages in the Presence of Selection and Unobserved Heterogeneity

Stacey H. Chen
Additional contact information
Stacey H. Chen: Department of Economics, University at Albany-SUNY

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008, vol. 90, issue 2, 275-289

Abstract: Identification of potential wage distributions by education is important to the study of the causal links between education, inequality, and uncertainty. Potential wage inequality within an educational group (that is, the variance in wages if all workers had the same education) exceeds the observed statistics because self-selected education truncates wage distributions. Decomposing potential wage inequality into heterogeneity (known to the agent making the educational choice) and uncertainty (unknown to the agent) suggests that wage uncertainty does not necessarily rise with education. It is unobserved heterogeneity, not uncertainty, that explains the observed relationship between college graduation and higher wage inequality. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.90.2.275 link to full text (application/pdf)
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:tpr:restat:v:90:y:2008:i:2:p:275-289

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().