IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34251.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Human Capital and Racial Inequality in the US Labor Market

Author

Listed:
  • Owen Thompson

Abstract

If racial gaps in measures of human capital like educational attainment and standardized test scores were eliminated, what would happen to racial disparities in wages, employment, and other labor market outcomes? A credible answer to this question is foundational for understanding the nature and scope of racial inequality and discrimination in the United States. This article reviews and synthesizes a literature that studies this question by estimating the extent to which controlling for measures of human capital changes Black-white gaps in labor market outcomes, and discusses various conceptual and methodological issues related to interpreting this type of exercise. I show that while accurately interpreting this exercise and its many variants requires careful thinking, the results elucidate many important and subtle aspects of racial inequality in the United States.

Suggested Citation

  • Owen Thompson, 2025. "Human Capital and Racial Inequality in the US Labor Market," NBER Working Papers 34251, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34251
    Note: CH ED LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34251.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I26 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Returns to Education
    • I30 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General
    • J0 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General
    • J20 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - General
    • J70 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - General
    • J78 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Public Policy (including comparable worth)

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34251. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.