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Performance pay and the white-black wage gap

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>04/2012
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Labor Economics
Issue number2
Volume30
Number of pages42
Pages (from-to)249-290
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We show that the reported tendency for performance pay to be associated with greater wage inequality at the top of the earnings distribution applies only to white workers. This results in the white-black wage differential among those in performance pay jobs growing over the earnings distribution even as the same differential shrinks over the distribution for those not in performance pay jobs. We show that this remains true even when examining suitable counterfactuals that hold observables constant between whites and blacks. We explore reasons behind our finding focusing on the interactions between discrimination, unmeasured ability, and selection.