The black-white wage gap among young women in 1990 vs. 2011: The role of selection and educational attainment

In this paper, we compare the black-white median log wage gap for women aged 26-31 in 1990 and 2011. Two stylized facts emerge. First, the pattern of selection in the two years is similar - the gaps observed among women employed in 1990 and 2011 substantially understate the gaps that would have been observed had all 26-31 year-old women been working in those years. Second, both the median log wage gap observed in the data and the selection-corrected gap increased substantially between the two years, a fact that can be mostly attributed to changes in the distributions of educational attainment among young black and white women.