Human Capital and Racial Inequality in the US Labor Market

Owen Thompson

No 34251, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: If racial gaps in measures of human capital like educational attainment and standardized test scores were eliminated, what would happen to racial disparities in wages, employment, and other labor market outcomes? A credible answer to this question is foundational for understanding the nature and scope of racial inequality and discrimination in the United States. This article reviews and synthesizes a literature that studies this question by estimating the extent to which controlling for measures of human capital changes Black-white gaps in labor market outcomes, and discusses various conceptual and methodological issues related to interpreting this type of exercise. I show that while accurately interpreting this exercise and its many variants requires careful thinking, the results elucidate many important and subtle aspects of racial inequality in the United States.

JEL-codes: I26 I30 J0 J01 J20 J70 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: CH ED LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34251.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34251

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34251
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().