This paper argues that sex discrimination is an inefficient practice. We model sex discrimination as the complete exclusion of females from the labor market or as the exclusion of females from managerial positions. The former implies a reduction in GDP per capita; the latter distorts the...

Gender discrimination in South Asia is a well-documented fact. However, gender is only one of an individual’s many identities. This paper investigates how gender discrimination depends on the social identities of interacting parties. We use an experimental approach to identify gender...

This special edition of the Regional Review is based on presentations made at Reaching the Top: Challenges and Opportunities for Women Leaders, a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on March 3, 2004.

We don’t normally think of highly successful people as likely to suffer due to psychological pressure or stereotyping. But according to social psychologists, it is those most invested in their achievement who are most likely to fall prey to a kind of unconscious behavior known as stereotype...

This paper presents a series of experiments on discrimination in urban Lima, Peru. The experiments exploit degrees of information on performance as a way to assess how personal characteristics affect how people sort into groups, and the results show that behavior is not correlated with personal...

This article develops a new multilateral decomposition procedure for the analysis of wage differentials and applies this to the racial wage hierarchy in the South African labour market. Using micro-data on male workers from the 1994 October Household survey, it is found that whites received the...

In this paper we study the relationship between ethnic exclusion and earnings in Urban Peru. Our approach to the concept of ethnicity involves the usage of instruments in many of its several dimensions: mother tongue, parental background, religion, migration events and race. In order to...

The inclusion of multiple race information for the first time in the 2000 Census allows for a novel test for the presence of labor discrimination using the "one-drop rule." Identifying discrimination is straightforward and essentially relies on the discontinuous nature of the one-drop rule,...