Sector employment, wage gaps, and sector wage gap differentials in the labor market for doctorates

This thesi consist of l\\ o chapters. These chapter are pre ented as separate journal arti cles. although both chapters deal wi th doctorates in the labor market. Chapter I examines the supply and demand moti vations or agents in a labor market fo r Ph.D.s that is segmented by sector. Labor is heterogeneou · acros ectors in that indi,·iduals with the same skill s may earn different wages in different st:ctors. This can be attributed to ector differences in the organizational structure of work. and differences in the pricing of sector-speci fie output. cctor employers maximize profits by offering a prospective employee a wage equal to the employee· s estimated \'a Jue or marginal product in that sector. Prospective employee select employment in the sector that yields the highest degree of utility in employment. Employees ma, imize utility based on personal tastes (that are inherently identified by demographic characteristics) and on the wages offered to them by employers in different ectors. Wage offers are assumed to be determined independent o f employees ' supply dec isions (i.e. they are exogenous in the utili ty max imization problem). Chapter 2 presents an analysis of wage differences across gender and race categories. It performs vvage gap decompositions that determine the portions of the wage gap attributed to differences in the stock or human capi tal and di ffcrence in employer valuation of genderand race-speci fic human capital. Moreover, Chapter 1 examines sector diffe rences in these wage gap . It decomposes sector wage gap differentials into observed and unobserved human capital and pri ce effects. The ob erved human capital effect (also kno\J n as the observed X effect) evaluates sector differences in the relati ve human capi tal stock of gender and race categories. The observed price effect calculates the conlribution of seclor difference in the