IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29022.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Task-Based Discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Erik Hurst
  • Yona Rubinstein
  • Kazuatsu Shimizu

Abstract

Why did the Black-White wage gap converge from 1960 to 1980 and why has it stagnated since? To answer this question, we introduce a unified model that integrates notions of both taste-based and statistical discrimination into a task-based model of occupational sorting. At the heart of our framework is the idea that discrimination varies by the task requirement of each job. We use this framework to identify and quantify the role of trends in race-specific factors and changing task prices in explaining the evolution of the Black-White wage gap since 1960. In doing so, we highlight a new task measure - Contact tasks – which measures the extent to which individuals interact with others as part of their job. We provide evidence that changes in the racial gap in Contact tasks serves as a good proxy for changes in taste-based discrimination over time. We find that taste-based discrimination has fallen and racial skill gaps have narrowed over the last sixty years in the United States. However, since the 1980s, the effect of declining racial skill gaps and discrimination on the Black-White wage gap were offset by the increasing returns to Abstract tasks which, on average, favored White workers relative to Black workers.

Suggested Citation

  • Erik Hurst & Yona Rubinstein & Kazuatsu Shimizu, 2021. "Task-Based Discrimination," NBER Working Papers 29022, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29022
    Note: EFG LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29022.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christopher F. Baum & Hans Lööf & Andreas Stephan & Klaus F. Zimmermann, 2024. "Estimating the Wage Premia of Refugee Immigrants: Lessons from Sweden," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 77(4), pages 562-597, August.
    2. Bhagia, Div & Bryson, Carter, 2023. "Understanding the racial employment gap: The role of sectoral shifts," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    3. Samuel Cole & Zachary Cowell & John M. Nunley & R. Alan Seals Jr, 2022. "The Distribution of Occupational Tasks in the United States: Implications for a Diverse and Aging Population," Papers 2205.00497, arXiv.org.
    4. Yashiv, Eran, 2021. "Moving from a poor economy to a rich one: A job tasks approach," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    5. Hope Bodenschatz & Gerald Eric Daniels Jr. & Jeffrey P. Thompson, 2023. "Decomposing Lifetime-Earnings Differences between White, Black, and Hispanic Families," Working Papers 23-14, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J7 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29022. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.