TY - JOUR T1 - The Differing Nature of Black-White Wage Inequality Across Occupational Sectors JF - Journal of Human Resources JO - J Hum Resour SP - 398 LP - 434 DO - 10.3368/jhr.XLII.2.398 VL - XLII IS - 2 AU - David Bjerk Y1 - 2007/03/31 UR - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLII/2/398.abstract N2 - The nature of racial wage inequality appears to differ across occupation sectors. Specifically, I find that all of the racial wage inequality in the white-collar job sector can be accounted for by controlling for the academic skill level of each worker, but almost half of the overall racial wage inequality remains in the blue-collar sector after controlling for each worker’s academic skill. Relatedly, after controlling for academic skill, I find that black workers are actually more likely to work in the white-collar sector than white workers. I show that these findings are consistent, and arguably directly implied by, both preference-based and statistical-based models of discrimination. However, omitted variable bias and measurement error also cannot be ruled out as possible explanations. ER -