The black–white wage gap among young women in 1990 vs. 2011: The role of selection and educational attainment

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the black–white median log wage gap for women aged 26–31 in 1990 and 2011. Two stylized facts emerge. First, the pattern of selection in the two years is similar — the gaps observed among women employed in 1990 and 2011 substantially understate the gaps that would have been observed had all 26–31 year-old women been working in those years. Second, both the median log wage gap observed in the data and the selection-corrected gap increased substantially between the two years, a fact that can be mostly attributed to changes in the distributions of educational attainment among young black and white women.