White workers in the United States earn almost 30 percent more per hour on average than Black workers, and this wage gap is associated with large racial differences in occupational assignments. In this article, we theoretically and empirically examine the Black-White disparity in occupations....

This paper attempts to understand the forces that have lead to persistent racial wage inequality by developing a dynamic model of statistical discrimination that accounts for the transmission of earnings across generations. The parameters of this model are then estimated using data from the 1970...