[Employment Discrimination and Statistical Science]: Comment

Wages, Employment, and Statistical Discrimination: Evidence from the Laboratory

When membership in a particular group conveys valuable information about an individual’s skills, productivity, or other human capital characteristics, a non-prejudiced agent may still find it rational to statistically discriminate. We frame statistical discrimination in a labor market setting for a series of laboratory experiments. A main objective of our experiments is to examine how varying p...

Minimum Wages and Employment: Comment

Does increasing the minimum wage lead to employment losses? For many years most economists thought that the answer to this was a straightforward ‘yes’. However, research during the 1990s began to overturn this conventional wisdom and showed that increases in the minimum wage did not automatically lead to employment losses. A recent Australian study, by Leigh (2003), examined the impact of statu...

Discrimination in Employment

Statistical Discrimination, Employer Learning, and Employment Di¤erentials by Race, Gender, and Education

Previous papers on testing for statistical discrimination and employer learning require variables that employers do not observe directly, but are observed by researchers or data on employer-provided performance measures. This paper develops a test that does not rely on these speci…c variables. The proposed test can be performed with individual-level cross-section data on employment status, expe...

Statistical Discrimination and Efficiency

This paper asks whether statistical discrimination is a market failure. I consider the problem for a utilitarian social planner who operates in an environment that can generate statistical discrimination as an equilibrium phenomenon. It is found that there are potential efficiency gains from discrimination in terms of reduced “mismatch” between workers and jobs. Whether the solution to the plan...