This study investigates the extent to which differences in average earnings between men and women may be the result of sorting by the sexes into jobs with different average levels of disagreeable and agreeable working conditions. An analysis of data from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey shows that, on average, men and women hold jobs with substantially different working conditions and that these differences are of a pattern suggesting the need to pay higher wages to attract employees to the jobs held by men. Estimation of wage equations shows that these differences in working conditions contribute significantly to the ability to explain average earnings for each sex.
The large inflow of less-educated immigrants into the United States in recent decades may have affected US natives’ labor market outcomes in many ways, including their working conditions. Although the general consensus is that low-skilled immigrants tend to hold “worse” jobs than US natives, the impact of immigration on natives’ working conditions has received little attention. This study examines how immigration has affected US natives’ occupational exposure to workplace hazards and the compensating differential paid for such exposure from 1990 to 2018. Results indicate that immigration causes less-educated natives’ exposure to workplace hazards to fall, and instrumental variables results show a larger impact among women than among men. The corresponding compensating differential appears to fall among men, but not after accounting for immigration-induced changes in the financial returns to occupational skills.
Immigration, Working Conditions, and Compensating Differentials