Center for Business and Economic Research faculty member Celeste Carruthers and Economics faculty member Marianne Wanamaker were recently featured in The Atlantic. In the article, Carruthers and Wanamaker shed light on today’s racial wage gap by turning to history.
The big question that Carruthers and Wanamaker wanted to sort out was why the average black man and the average white man were earning different wages. Was it because employers were discriminating against black workers when determining pay? Or was it because black workers’ skill sets were relatively less valuable?