Race, Culture, and Skill: Interracial Wage Differences Among African Americans, Latinos, and Whites.” Working Paper. South Bend: University of Notre Dame

This article examines the interrelationships among race, culture, skill, and the distribution of wages. I utilize a three-equation system to explore this process: skill is a multidimensional productive attribute measured by years of education and work effort; educational attain-ment is a function of class background and individual effort; and individual wage rates are a function of skill and class background. By further assuming that effort is differentially distributed across indi-viduals and social groups, I am able to estimate reduced form equa-tions for educational and earnings attainment, where both equations are functions of the class backgrounds and race of individuals. The collective results of this article challenge the conventional wis-dom among economists hat African American and Latino job skills are of a lower quality than white job skills. To the extent hat effort is an important element of worker skill, our results suggest hat neither African American nor Latino labor is of lower quality than white labor. The results regarding differences between African Americans and whites in educational ttainment, i.e., African Americans are able to translate agiven level of resources into higher levels of educational attainment, reaffirm previous findings in the literature. The results on Latino versus white educational attainment are novel. Additionally, unlike previous research, this article connects racial differences in the skill acquisition process to the economics of discrimination