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...

type="main" xml:id="ecin12103-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> We report results from laboratory experiments designed to examine statistical discrimination. Our design expands upon existing research by generating data both on wage contracts and unemployment rates of directly competing worker groups. We find...

Statistical discrimination occurs when distinctions between demographic groups are made on the basis of real or imagined statistical distinctions between the groups. While such discrimination is legal in some cases (e.g., insurance markets), it is illegal and/or controversial in others (e.g.,...

This article reports results from controlled laboratory experiments designed to study secondmoment (that is, risk-based) statistical discrimination in a labor market setting. Since decision makers may not view risk in the same way as economists or statisticians (that is, risk 5 variance of...

Applying a new decomposition method to U.S. PSID and Danish Longitudinal Sample data, the authors compare how U.S. and Danish gender wage gaps developed between 1983 and 1995. In Denmark, they find, the wage gap widened, because the worsening in women's relative returns to observable human...

An intuitively appealing method for estimating gender wage gaps by industry is shown to yield estimates that vary according to the arbitrary choice of left-out reference groups for non-industry categorical variables, such as race and marital status. This study uses data from the Current...

Applying a new decomposition method to U.S. PSID and Danish Longitudinal Sample data, the authors compare how U.S. and Danish gender wage gaps developed between 1983 and 1995. In Denmark, they find, the wage gap widened, because the worsening in women's relative returns to observable human...

The authors analyze eleven years of employment data for a regional grocery store chain in the United States that faced a class-action lawsuit over gender discrimination. The data include all employees' job titles, wage rates, and earnings, allowing an examination of initial job assignments,...