Prejudice and Wages: An Empirical Assessment of Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination
نویسندگان
چکیده
We test the predictions from Becker’s (1957) seminal work on employer prejudice and find that relative black wages (a) vary negatively with the prejudice of the “marginal” white in a state, (b) vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state, and (c) vary negatively with the fraction of a state that is black. Our estimates suggest that one-quarter of the racial wage gap is due to prejudice, with nontrivial consequences for black lifetime earnings.
منابع مشابه
Prejudice and the Economics of Discrimination
This paper re-examines the role of prejudice in labor market discrimination against racial minorities. We review Becker’s (1957) model of employer discrimination, outlining its main implications. We argue that the widely accepted theoretical result from Becker that competition ultimately forces prejudiced employers to shut down can be reversed with two reasonable assumptions. First, following B...
متن کاملCompetition and Gender Prejudice: Are Discriminatory Employers Doomed to Fail? #146 RUHR
According to Becker’s (1957) famous theory on discrimination, entrepreneurs with a strong prejudice against female workers forgo profi ts by submitting to their tastes. In a competitive market their fi rms lack effi ciency and are therefore forced to leave. We present new empirical evidence for this prediction by studying the survival of startup fi rms in a large longitudinal matched employer-e...
متن کاملاثر اشتغال زنان بر شکاف درآمدی جنسیتی در ایران (1390-1370)
Women as half of the workforce in society can be an effective lever to promote economic and social development goals. In recent years, participation of women in development activities has increased. But the participation of women has been associated with discrimination against them. In recent years with increasing participation of women in the labor market, the income gap between men and women ...
متن کاملThe Dynamic Effects of Export and Technological Changes on Relative Wages
he links among trade, technological changes, and worker earnings have been the subject of intense research during the past few decades. The current literature on this subject shows that trade liberalization and technological changes are the main drivers of demand for skilled workers and a rise in the wage premium. In the present article, a panel of 134 Iranian manufacturing industries over the ...
متن کامل14.662 S15 Labor Economics II Lecture 20
Many researchers have taken an “unexplained” or residual gap between male and female wages (or black and white wages) conditional on observables as evidence of discrimination. Although such differences in residual wages are consistent with discrimination, omitted variables are always a concern, and this is also a very indirect way of testing for discrimination. Moreover, as we will discuss, som...
متن کامل