This paper provides empirical assessments of the two leading explanations of measured interindustry wage differentials: (1) true wage differentials exist across industries and (2) the measured differentials simply reflect unmeasured differences in workers' productive abilities. First, the authors summarize the existing evidence on the unmeasured-ability explanation. Second, the authors construct a simple model that shows that if matching is important then endogenous job-change decisions can create important self-selection biases even in first-differenced estimates of industry wage differentials. Third, the authors analyze a sample that approximates the experiment of exogenous job loss. Copyright 1992 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.