Jan Svoboda

Position of Minorities in the Us Labor Market Jan Svoboda

Discrimination has always been an issue in the U. S. It was a well discussed topic in the 1980s but since then the discussion gradually faded away. Does it mean that discrimination did too? This is only one of the questions this book gives an answer to. It compares the position of the main minorities in the U. S. labor market, namely African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, to Caucasians, now and back in the 1980s. Has the situation improved? Which of the minorities is worse off? Which one is better off? The first part of the book provides theoretical background from the field of economics of discrimination, further on, some statistics from the U. S. labor market, and finally gives an overview of the literature from this field. The second part of the book is devoted to the empirical analysis of wage discrimination in the U. S., using the American Community Survey 1980 and 2007, and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The book should be especially useful to public administration, or anyone else who is interested in equality issues.