Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
Name
prosocial_final.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.12 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
44447ea5eb81dd1722200f6f26b07f5d
Author(s)
Wilmers, Nathan
Zhang, Letian
Date Issued
2022
Journal
American Sociological Review
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
Wilmers, Nathan and Zhang, Letian. 2022. "Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium." American Sociological Review, 87 (3).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings inequality, but through a different channel than generosity. Building on research on job values, we hypothesize that college graduates are more willing than nongraduates to sacrifice pay for prosocial impact. When employers appeal to prosocial values, they can thus disproportionately reduce pay for higher-educated workers. We test this theory with data on online U.S. job postings. We find that prosocial jobs requiring a college degree post lower pay than do standard postings with exactly the same job requirements; prosocial jobs that do not require a college degree, however, pay no differently from other low-education jobs. This gap reduces the aggregate college wage premium by around 5 percent. We present a variety of supplementary evidence using labor market data, worker survey responses, and a vignette experiment with hiring managers. The findings reveal an unintended consequence of employers’ embrace of prosocial values: it offsets macro-level inequality.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221089335
