Statistical Discrimination and the Distribution of Wages

This paper builds on and subsumes a previous version titled “Which wage distributions are consistent with statistical discrimination?” by the second and third authors. We are very grateful to Paula Onuchic for engaging in a conversation with us that inspired this paper and to her, Aislinn Bohren, Michael Grubb, Peter Hull, Alex Imas, Namrata Kala, Georgy Kalashnov, Rob McMillan, and Konstantinos Tatsiramos for detailed discussions. We would also like to thank Torsha Chakravorty, Juan Eberhard, Kory Kroft, Aditya Kuvalekar, Marco Manacorda, Mallesh Pai, Debraj Ray, Maher Said and numerous seminar participants for insightful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.