《西方经济学》习题答案—Chapter 19.docVIP

SOLUTIONS TO TEXT PROBLEMS: Quick Quizzes 1. A compensating differential is a difference in wages that arises to offset the nonmonetary characteristics of different jobs. Examples include coal miners who earn extra wages to compensate them for dangerous working conditions, workers on the night shift who get paid more than day-shift workers, and professors who are paid less than lawyers and doctors. More educated workers earn more than less educated workers because they are more productive, so employers are willing to pay them more, and because more education may signal greater ability. 2. It is hard to establish whether a group of workers are being discriminated against because there are many reasons other than discrimination for wages to differ across workers, especially differences in human capital and job characteristics. Profit-maximizing firms tend to eliminate discriminatory wage differentials because if some set of workers were being discriminated against, it would be in the interest of profit-maximizing firms to hire those workers with lower wages. But that, in turn, would raise the wages of those workers until the wages of all similar workers were equal. A discriminatory wage differential might persist if customers discriminated between people, as may have been the case with old baseball cards, in which the prices of the baseballs cards differed depending on the race of the player depicted on the card. Questions for Review 1. Coal miners get paid more than other workers with similar amounts of education because their higher wage compensates them for the dirty and dangerous nature of coal mining, as well as their long-term health problems. As a result, they earn a sizable compensating differential. 2. Education is a type of capital because it represents an expenditure of resources at one point in time to raise productivity in the future. 3. Education might raise a workers wage without raising the workers productivity if education p