The Gender Pay Gap and Its Determinants Across the Human Capital Distribution

Ariel Binder, Amanda Eng, Kendall Houghton and Andrew Foote

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: This paper links American Community Survey data and postsecondary transcript records to examine how the gender pay gap varies across the distribution of education credentials for a sample of 2003-2013 graduates. Although recent literature emphasizes gender inequality among the most-educated, we find a smaller gender pay gap at higher education levels. Field-of-degree and occupation effects explain most of the gap among top bachelor�s graduates, while work hours and unobserved channels matter more for less-competitive bachelor�s, associate, and certificate graduates. We develop a novel decomposition of the child penalty to examine the role of children in explaining these results.

Keywords: gender pay gap; postsecondary transcript records; college selectivity; human capital; field and occupation choice; labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I26 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-31R.pdf Revised version, 2024 (application/pdf)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-31.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:23-31

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