Publications
Publications
- 2022
- American Sociological Review
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
By: Nathan Wilmers and Letian Zhang
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 their
competitors are. In this paper, 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. So when employers appeal
to prosocial values, they can disproportionately reduce pay for higher-educated workers. We test this theory with data on online US job postings. We find that prosocial
jobs requiring a college degree post lower pay than standard postings with exactly the
same job requirements, whereas pay at prosocial jobs not requiring a college degree 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.
Keywords
Citation
Wilmers, Nathan, and Letian Zhang. "Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium." American Sociological Review 87, no. 3 (2022): 415–442.