| Description |
Hispanic workers on average earn less than white workers in both Utah and the Intermountain region. Average wage disparities in Utah and the Intermountain region are largely similar in magnitude, with various socioeconomic factors affecting these wage disparities. However, little is known about the underlying factors that contribute to these wage gaps. In this paper, we use the Oaxaca-Blinder method to decompose the wage gap between Hispanic and white workers in Utah and the Intermountain region into endowments and returns components which account for the differences in the average workforce attributes and average returns to these attributes, respectively. The data source is the Merged Outgoing Rotation Files (MORG) of the Current Population Survey. We will pool the data between the uears of 2010 through 2014 to analyze the wage gap. We find that the raw gap between non-hispanic white wages and Hispanic wages are 29.9% in the Intermountain region. In Utah, this gap was 28/3%. Although Utah's raw gap is smaller, we see that the returns effect in Utah is a larger percentage of this gap in comparison to the Intermountain region. The returns effect in the Intermountain region model was 7.08 percentage points of the raw gap, whereas the endowments effect was 22.83 percentage points. In Utah, the endowment portion was 20.2 percentage points of the raw gap, whereas the raw gap was 8.1 percentage points. |
