Inequality across gender/race Flashcards
What are the possible channels through which inequality of race/gender comes about?
1) Early childhood influences
2) Neighbourhoods when growing up
3) Access to/quality of schooling
4) Chance of being hired when applying for a job
5) Wages
6) Chance of promotion/being fired
7) treatment by clients
8) Treatment by police
What early evidence of discrimination was there?
1) Negative coefficient on female dummy variable for wages
2) Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition: discriminatory component found to be significant
Why weren’t early studies found to be conclusive?
1) Minority could be found to have less productive characteristics.
2) Endogenous Beta - higher returns to male characteristics
3) Endogenous X - expectations of future discrimination reduce X’s
What are Audit Studies (Field Experiments)?
Send testors (auditors) with identical resumes to job interviews and evaluate whether the minority members are worse off
What is Bertrand and Mullainathan’s (2004) Research design?
1) They send fictitious resumes with randomly assigned African-american or White ‘sounding’ names to job ads in Boston and Chicago
2) There was 1 high quality resume and 1 low quality resume, measured by experience, languages, employment history
3) Sent 4 resumes to jobs such as sales, administrative, clerical and customer service roles
What were the advantages of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004)?
Addresses the limitations of Audit studies - they have a large sample size of 1300 and there is no face-to-dace interaction
What were Bertrand and Mullainathan’s (2004) findings?
1) White names received 50% more call-backs
2) High quality resumes gave higher returns to white names
3) No evidence postal address improved black names
4) Race gap relatively uniform across industries/occupations
What were the limitations of Bertrand and Mullainathan’s (2004) work?
1) Interested in offers NOT call backs
2) Race inferred not directly reported
3) Names are very distinct - don’t represent average population
4) Only 2 metropolitan areas
5) Limited occupations
6) No information on other candidates or the composition of current employees
What was the research design of Goldin and Rouse (2000)?
1) Using audition records from 8 major symphony orchestras between 1950-1995
2) Using difference-in-difference, test the interaction between whether the person auditioning was woman and whether they used a screen
3) Was the increase in proportion of female members of orchestras due to the blind auditions?
What were Goldin and Rouse (2000)’s findings?
1) Blind auditions increased female advancement to next round
2) The transition to blind auditions explains 30% of the increase in proportion of women in new hires and 25% of the increase in proportion of women in orchestras overall
Ware are the cautions of Goldin and Rouse (2000)?
1) Women who choose blind auditions may be of a different skill-level to those who choose not
2) Performance might be of a different standard due to the screens (confidence)
What are the theoretical models of discrimination?
1) Taste for Discrimination (Employer, employee, clients)
2) Statistical Discrimination
3) Overcrowding
4) Institutional
Explain taste for discrimination
People act as those there is a non-pecuniary cost to associating with a particular group, nothing to do with productive attributes
Explain Statistical discrimination
Employer relies on group characteristics rather than the individual characteristics. Such as “all women will go on maternity leave” or ‘African-americans are from areas with bad schooling
Explain Over crowding
Minority groups crowd out the lower wage jobs in the expectation that they won’t get a job elsewhere
