Rural wages and returns to education: Differences between whites, blacks, and American Indians

Abstract

This paper examines racial and gender wage differences for rural workers. Its contribution is twofold, with a broadening of the existing research regarding rural workers, and its new evidence of the structure of wages faced by American Indians. The results show that with the rural focus, American Indian males and Black females experience the weakest wage returns to education within their respective genders. However, merely examining employment and wage rates, American Indians and Blacks of both genders face an economic disadvantage relative to Whites. Examining wage gaps, gender differences are more striking. Females face smaller actual majority/minority wage gaps, but more of the gap remains unexplained by personal and job characteristics. In other words, male wage gaps are driven more by differences in characteristics, while female wage gaps are driven more by difference in returns. This implies that discrimination is more prevalent in the rural female labor market, although its actual effect on wages is smaller.