This paper presents Gary Becker's approach to conducting creative, empirically fruitful economic research. It describes the traits and methodology that made him such a productive and influential scholar.

This paper is an experimental analysis of the role played by workers’ expectations in explaining the puzzling long-run persistence of observed discrimination against certain minorities in the labor market. The experiment provides some evidence supporting the theoretical prediction that unequal...

Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were made to test for age discrimination in hiring. A twenty-one year-old and a thirty-nine year-old woman applied for jobs where a "new graduate" was sought; men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired about employment as waiters; women...

While researchers have long held that discrimination cannot endure in an increasingly competitive environment, there has been little work testing this dynamic process. This paper tests the hypothesis (based on Becker 1957) that increased competition resulting from globalization in the 1980s...

In a field experiment of age discrimination, pairs of men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired, by email, about employment as waiters in twenty four French towns. The rate of net discrimination found against the older French waiter, corresponds to the highest rates ever recorded anywhere,...

This paper considers a labour market model of monopsonistic competition with taste-based discrimination against minority workers to study the effect of equal pay legislation on labour market inequality. When the taste for discrimination is small or competition is weak, the policy removes job...

This paper estimates racial differences in the retention probability, pay and performance of NBA coaches over the 1996-2003 period. Using a hazard function approach, I find small and statistically insignificant racial differences in the exit hazard, conditional on team performance, team payroll,...

We investigate wage effects of deviations from peer group body mass index (BMI) to evaluate the influence of social norms on wages. Our approach allows for disentangling the influence of the social norm from any (anticipated) productivity effects associated with deviations from a clinically...

We consider a model of prejudice-driven discrimination, where the advantaged 'tall' discriminate against the disadvantaged 'short'. We employ an egalitarian social welfare function to compare anti-discrimination legal rules with a non-discriminatory ('height-blind') income tax.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate wage structures of professional workers in the Israeli labor market, using data from the most recent 1995 Census and correcting for selectivity at the stage of entrance into the occupation. The sample of professionals is decomposed into several...