Wage Discrimination Measurement : In Defense of a Simple but Informative Statistical Tool

We examine several functional and numerical measures of wage discrimination in the spirit of the Lorenz curve. The First Order discrimination curve is based on the comparison of the wage CDF of two subpopulations. Three different Second Order discrimination curves are derived to refine the first one by taking into account inequality and/or efficiency in the wage distribution across the two groups. We explore the relationship between these curves and some popular discrimination indices. We use standard economic size distributions to recover closed forms of discrimination curves. The main results are illustrated on PSID data, year 2005