Race, gender, and the role of education in earnings inequality: An introduction

This article serves as an introduction to an issue of the Economics of Education Review devoted to research on the role of education in explaining economic inequality among different ethnic/race and gender groups in national labor markets. The article admits that the broad nature of this topic implies that the research presented here is only a small sampling of the work being done worldwide. It argues nevertheless that these seven articles go beyond most in not only attempting to understand why individuals of certain ethnicities earn less or more than individuals from other groups and why men almost universally earn more than women, but in explaining why such ethnic and gender inequalities change over time, and what the role of educational inequality may have to do with these changes. The main contribution of the pieces, therefore, is in presenting alternative models and empirical data testing them for analyzing changing ethnic/gender inequalities worldwide. The articles cover Hong Kong, Israel, Peru, the Republic of Korea and the United States. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd