NBER Publications by Elizabeth Brainerd

While researchers have long held that discrimination cannot endure in an increasingly competitive environment, there has been little work testing this dynamic process. This paper tests the hypothesis (based on Becker 1957) that increased competition resulting from globalization in the 1980s forced employers to reduce costly discrimination against women. The empirical strategy exploits differences in market structure across industries to identify the impact of trade on the gender wage gap: because concentrated industries face little competitive pressure to reduce discrimination, an increase in competition from increased trade should lead to a reduction in the gender wage gap. We compare the change in the residual gender wage gap between 1976 and 1993 in concentrated versus competitive m...