Existing Estimates Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 568.full
Hubbard 569
have looked to factors that prevented women in the past from exploiting the higher college wage premium for women. Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006 point to past
barriers to women’s education and careers; as these barriers fell, the gender differ- ence in the college wage premium became decisive: “According to most estimates,
the college log or percentage wage premium is actually higher for women than men, and it has been for some time. . . . As the labor force participation of women
has begun to resemble men’s, women have responded to the monetary returns.” Analogously, Chiappori, Iyigun, and Weiss 2009 combine an exogenous fall in the
time required for housework and “the higher labor-market return to schooling for women” to explain the relative rise in women’s college attainment.
But what if this stylized fact, the starting point for these arguments, is wrong? I will argue that the college wage premium for women is not larger for women than
men, and we must revisit our accounts of the dramatic rise in women’s college attainment relative to men. Most recent estimates rely on Current Population Survey
CPS wage data that are “topcoded” or censored at a maximum value. Topcoding biases estimates of the college wage premium downward for males relative to fe-
males, and the magnitude of this bias has grown over time. Once I account for this bias, I find no gender difference in the college wage premium in recent years.
This paper proceeds as follows. Section II briefly discusses recent estimates of the college wage premiums for men and women. None of these estimates adequately
accounts for the bias caused by censoring. Section III presents facts on topcoding and shows how topcoding can bias estimates of the college wage premium. Section
IV describes the data set I use in my estimates. In Section V, I reestimate college wage premiums for men and women using CPS data after accounting for topcodes,
and show that the college wage premium is not larger for women than for men, at least in recent years. Section VI concludes.