Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less-lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which...

Within the attempts to understand Mexican economic inequality, returns to education have received a great deal of attention. The driving question has been: why are Mexican wages so unequal? This paper argues that not only the distribution of human capital matters, but also sociodemographic...

We develop a semi-structural price vector autoregression to capture coffee price dynamics over various time horizons. The presence of the International Coffee Agreement is permitted to alter supply responses to price signals through yield and planting effects. In the short run, the ICA caused...

We examine the effects of trade and services liberalization on wage inequality in India. We find that labor reallocations and wage shifts attributable to liberalization account for at most 29% of the increase in inequality between 1993 and 2004, and that effects of services reforms are many...

We hypothesize two sources for sheepskin effects – signaling, and diplomas tied to jobs with downwards rigid wages. These theories have implications for diploma effects not only in the first, but also the second moments of the Mincerian earnings distribution that we are able to identify using a...

We compare four explanations for the value of diplomas, each of which has implications for unemployment and wage variation amongst graduates, most of which have not previously been tested for when seeking to explain the effects of diplomas. We test for these implications using a refined...

Does women’s empowerment strengthen global good citizenship? We test theories of democratic foreign policy and feminist international relations that suggest that more deeply democratic countries with greater gender equity will be stronger international human rights promoters. First, the...

We exploit panel data and large, abrupt, and unusual dislocations of Indonesian workers in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis to investigate the robustness and persistence of inter-industry wage differentials (IWDs). Unobserved worker characteristics explain 36% of IWDs. IWDs persist through...