We use cookies to provide you with the best possible website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as cookies used for anonymous statistics, comfort settings, or displaying personalized content. You can decide which categories you want to allow. Please note that depending on your settings, some features of the website may not be available.

Cookie settings

These necessary cookies are required to enable the core functionality of the website. Opting out of these cookies is not possible.

cb-enable
This cookie stores the user's cookie consent status for the current domain. Expiry: 1 year.
laravel_session
Stores the session ID to recognize the user when the page reloads and to restore their login session. Expiry: 2 hours.
XSRF-TOKEN
Provides CSRF protection for forms. Expiry: 2 hours.
IZA Discussion Paper No. 1555
April 2005
Using Matched Employer-Employee Data to Study Labor Market Discrimination

published in: William Rodgers (ed.), Handbook on the Economics of Discrimination, Edgar Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham. 2006, 29-60

Wage gaps between individuals of difference races, sexes, and ethnicities have been documented and replicated extensively, and have generated a long history in labor economics research of empirical tests for labor market discrimination. The most widely-used approach to test for labor market discrimination is based on wage regressions estimated at the level of individual workers, with the estimate of discrimination inferred from the residual race, sex, or ethnic group differential in wages that remains unexplained after including a wide array of proxies for productivity. What is absent from the residual wage approach – and in our view leaves the approach vulnerable to being regarded as uninformative regarding discrimination – is any directly observable measure of productivity with which to adjust differentials in wages in trying to infer whether a particular group suffers from discrimination. The ideal solution would be individual-level productivity data that can be compared with wages. Any of the variables that differ across groups and are unobserved in the residual wage regression approach should affect wages and productivity equally, and hence not bias the test. However, such data are extremely rare, in large part because individual productivity is often unobservable and seldom measured. This chapter focuses on the use of matched employer-employee data sets to carry out a version of this ideal test, but at the establishment level. When these data sets permit the measurement of the demographic characteristics of establishments' workforces, as well as the estimation of production functions, they can be used to infer productivity differentials between workers in different groups. Comparisons of these productivity differentials with wage differentials then provide versions of the ideal test for discrimination at the establishment level. In addition to providing tests of discrimination, matched employer-employee data sets have proven useful in studying other questions that arise in the economics of discrimination, including measuring labor market segregation and assessing its consequences, and examining hypotheses or predictions that are central to economic models of discrimination.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

About IZA@LISER Network
Contact
IZA Network (Current Site Operator):

Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
11, Porte des Sciences
Maison des Sciences Humaines
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette / Belval, Luxembourg

IZA Institute (In Liquidation):

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH i. L.
Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 5-9, 53113 Bonn. Germany
Phone: +49 228 3894-0 | Fax: +49 228 3894-510
E-Mail: info@iza.org | Web: www.iza.org
Represented by: Martin T. Clemens (Liquidator)