How Do Employees of Ethnic Origin Fare on the Occupational Ladder in Britain?

This paper is concerned with inter‐group differences in the chances of being in different occupational classes. In particular, it focuses on Indian and on Black‐Caribbean men, in Britain, who were in full‐time employment. It asks: how much of the relative lack of occupational success experienced by Indians and Black‐Caribbean men can be explained by ethnic disadvantage and how much by the fact that they have the wrong worker attributes? It develops a decomposition methodology for answering this question within the context of discrete choice models with more than two alternatives, and it applies this methodology to microdata from the 1991 Census for Britain.