Wage Gaps And Demographic Behavior Essay Research — страница 3

  • Просмотров 336
  • Скачиваний 5
  • Размер файла 17
    Кб

between whites, blacks, and Hispanics. The NWECD is uniquely suited to this analysis, as the Industry and Area Wage Surveys contain no information on race and ethnicity. Thus, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that looks at segregation by race and ethnicity at the level of the establishment and job cell.(5) We consider evidence on the effects of racial and ethnic segregation on wages, and the extent to which racial and ethnic wage differences remain after controlling for segregation. Such evidence helps to assess whether equal pay policies are likely to reduce these wage differences (assuming that these remaining differences reflect discrimination).(6) We are particularly interested in the question posed in the title of this paper, namely whether more severe

racial and ethnic segregation among men can explain why racial and ethnic wage gaps are bigger among men than among women. II. The Data The NWECD is created from two data sources, the Sample Detail file (SDF), which contains all individual responses to the 1990 Decennial Census one-in-six Long Form, and the 1990 Standard Statistical Establishment List (SSEL), which is an administrative database containing information for all business establishments operating in the United States in 1990. We construct the NWECD by using detailed location and industry information available in both data sets to match worker records in the SDF to employer records in the SSEL. In this section we discuss the details of the matching process, assess the accuracy of the match, and discuss the

representativeness of these matched data. The Matching Process Households receiving the 1990 Decennial Census Long Form were asked to report the name and address of the employer in the previous week for each employed member of the household. In addition, respondents were asked for the name and a brief (one or two word) description of the type of business or industry of the most recent employer for all members of the household. Based on the responses to these questions the Census Bureau assigned geographic and industry codes to each record in the data and it is these codes that are available in the SDF. In addition to this information, the SDF contains the standard set of demographic characteristics collected on the long-form of the Decennial Census. To construct the NWECD we

first selected records for the slightly more than 17 million respondents who indicated they were employed in the previous week. The SSEL is an annually updated list of all business establishments with one or more employees operating in the United States that the Census Bureau uses as a sampling frame for its various Economic Censuses and Surveys. As such, the SSEL contains the name and address of each establishment, geographic codes based on its location, and a four-digit SIC code. In addition, the SSEL contains data on the number of employees and total annual payroll for the establishment, a unique establishment identifier, as well as an identifier that allows the establishment to be linked to other establishments that are part of the same enterprise. To construct the NWECD, we

selected the 5.6 million records from the 1990 SSEL. We focus on the private sector, excluding establishments in Public Administration. Matching workers to employers proceeded in four steps. First, we standardized the geographic and industry codes in the two data sets. Next, we selected all establishments that were unique in an industry-location cell. Third, all workers who indicated they worked in the same industry-location cell as a unique establishment were matched to the establishment. Finally, we eliminated all matches based on imputed data. The resulting data set is what we call the NWECD. There are a number of issues involved in the matching process that merit further discussion. The first set of issues concerns standardizing the geographic and industry codes. The Census

Bureau divides the country into a hierarchy of geographic areas. For our purposes the relevant areas are state, county, place, tract, and block. The Census Bureau assigns a unique code to every state in the country. Within each state the Census Bureau assigns a unique code to every county. The Census Bureau also assigns a unique place code to population centers with 2,500 or more people. Because these population centers are unique within a state, but can cross county boundaries, we can distinguish between areas in the same place located in different counties. Finally, the Census Bureau divides up populated counties into unique tracts and divides tracts up into unique blocks.(7) Thus, for an establishment located in a metropolitan area, the Census Bureau assigns a unique