The Study On The Effects Of Discrimination On Wage Income

Wage is the price of labor resources transferred by both sides in the labor market.The level of wage income affects the change of labor supply and demand.Reasonable wage income pricing can promote the effective allocation of labor resources.In recent years,China’s economic restructuring has been deepening.In the process of industrial transformation,emerging industries often have higher wage income than traditional industries.Such wage income gap can be attributed to the influence of market supply and demand.However,there is still a significant wage gap in similar industries,which will affect the optimization of labor resource allocation and social harmony and stability.Therefore,the Chinese government urgently needs to understand the causes of wage gap and formulate policies to narrow unreasonable income gap.As a non-market feature of the labor market,discrimination is regarded as the main source of wage inequality.However,due to the multi-dimensional and significant differences among different groups in the labor market,existing discrimination studies are faced with the problem of missing variable bias when the control of group heterogeneity is insufficient.Considering gender,appearance,ethnicity and household registration is the social public opinion attention more discrimination factor,how to make the above four separated from omitted variable bias,discrimination and find their influence on labor wage income level,can response to the concern of social public opinion,not only can provide empirical data for the Chinese government to formulate relevant laws and regulations to promote fair labor wages,to reduce the unreasonable income gap.According to relevant historical research literature,researchers generally believe that there are wage income differences caused by gender characteristics in China’s labor market.However,due to differences in sample data and research methods,the results of influence degree obtained are different.It is generally believed that individuals with better physical appearance are more likely to be taken care of at work and thus more likely to earn higher wages.Employees in the workplace pay more attention to their own image and appearance level,and even led to the size of beauty makeup,clothing collocation,plastic surgery and other industries,the formation of "appearance level economy.However,the influence of appearance difference on wage income is more difficult to evaluate than that of gender.First,everyone has different aesthetic standards,which leads to strong subjective differences in the evaluation of appearance characteristics.Secondly,the influence of appearance difference on wage income is also relatively hidden.It is difficult to set control variables mainly through obtaining high-paying job opportunities,improving work evaluation of service objects,and obtaining work assistance from internal colleagues.The current research literature focuses on the two basic physical characteristics of height and weight,but this is far from describing the level of appearance,so the results are still controversial.In this paper,the appearance level of the sample is described by the way of grading appearance,which may be more appropriate.Moreover,the description of appearance can be quantified through the score,which is also convenient to set the definition standard of variables in the analysis.China is a vast multi-ethnic country,and the differences in ethnic and household registration characteristics are also discussed.China has always adhered to the principles of ethnic equality and ethnic unity,and a good situation of multi-ethnic struggle and common prosperity and development has taken shape.There are few studies on the impact of ethnic characteristics on wage income,mainly because ethnic characteristics are very complex,and the influence of ethnic habits on economy is not easy to observe and statistics,leading to the omission of variables and endogenous problems.The household registration system is also a unique system in China.Before the reform and opening up,there were great differences in household registration between urban and rural areas,which had a significant impact on education,employment,security and other aspects.However,with the rapid economic development,cross-regional migration of population is more and more frequent,and the household registration policies of cities are more open and standardized,which promotes the employment and living in different places.In recent years,the phenomenon of "Spring Festival travel" in which the population migrates on a large scale in a short term also shows that cross-regional employment of labor force has become a normal situation.The influence of household registration characteristics on wage income is not simply limited to the single factor of household registration,but also related to education,medical care,employment,social security and other aspects.Some factors are not observable or quantifiable,so they also form the missing variables.This paper uses the data of Chinese family tracking survey(CFPS)in 2016 and comprehensively adopts the methods of Altonji,Elder & Taber(2005)and Oster(2013)to quantitatively study the errors of missing variables in discrimination analysis based on gender,appearance,ethnicity and household registration.The results of this paper show that the influence of gender discrimination variable on wage income is greater than the omitted variable,indicating that gender discrimination is real.Except for women who work as clerical workers,there is no appearance discrimination in the labor market.There is no household registration discrimination or ethnic discrimination in the labor market.Therefore,in order to narrow the unreasonable wage gap,the Chinese government should focus on gender discrimination in the labor market.