Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change in the way symphony orchestras recruit musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased hiring. To overcome possible biases in...

Examining the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain, we find that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance. In the stores studied, cashiers work with different managers on different days and their schedules are determined quasi-randomly. When minority cashiers,...

Audit correspondence studies are field experiments that test for discriminatory behavior in active markets. Researchers measure discrimination by comparing how responsive individuals ("audited units") are to correspondences from different types of people. This paper elaborates on the tradeoffs...

Economics tends to define and measure discrimination as disparities stemming from the direct (causal) effects of protected group membership. But work in other fields notes that such measures are incomplete, as they can miss important systemic (i.e. indirect) channels. For example, racial...

This paper reviews some recent empirical analyses of the impact of affirmative action and anti-discrimination law on employment and productivity.The major findings are that:1)Affirmative action has some success in improving employment opportunities for minorities and females, particularly for...

Educational achievement in segregated school systems was considerably lower in the black schools than in the white schools. Economic historians have argued that the racial achievement gap reflected the discriminatory funding of the black schools. This paper assesses counterfactually the...

Affirmative action under Executive Order 11246 ranks among the most controversial of domestic federal policies.This study asks whether affirmative action has been successful in promoting the employment of minorities and females. It compares the change in demographics between 1974 and 1980 at...

This paper seeks to disentangle the impactof residential segregation from that of employment discrimination in determining black employment share. The major finding is that distance of a workplace from the main ghetto is one of the strongest and most significant determinants of both changes over...

Affirmative Action is not only supposed to help move minorities and females into employment, it is also supposed to help move them up the job ladder, and it is this second goal that is perhaps the more controversial. Studies of Affirmative Action during thel ate 1960's and early 1910's found it...

Opponents of the integration by race and gender of the American workplace have argued that forced equity will entail reduced productivity as employers are forced to hire lower quality females and minorities. The numerous wage equation studies always reach the same dead-end: residual differences...