This paper investigates whether differential treatment of men and women in the labor market is due to unobservable differences in productivity or if it is motivated by a taste for discrimination. While studies on sex-discrimination typically control for human capital (formal education,...

In this paper it is argued that occupational and organizational codes maximizethe correspondence between activities and easily observable characteristics atthe time of their development. Over time the codes become less relevant, leadingto the false impression that the segregation of individuals...

This paper provides a simple explanation for why some minority groups are economically successful, despite being subject to government-mandated discriminatory policies. We study an economy with private and public sectors in which workers invest in imperfectly observable skills that are important...

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.

Gender wage differentials, conditional on observed productivity characteristics, have been considered a possible indication of prejudice against women in the labor market. However, there is no conclusive evidence on whether these differentials are due to labor market discrimination or to...

Research in psychology indicates that individuals often make inferences regarding unknown individual qualities based on potentially irrelevant (but socially observable) information. This paper explores occupational choices when individuals receive imprecise signals regarding ability and use the...

We often observe minority ethnic groups at a disadvantage relative to the majority. Why is this and what can be done about it? Efforts made to assimilate, and time, are two elements working to bring the minority into line with the majority. A third element, the degree to which the majority...

Motivated by models of worker flows, we argue in this paper that monopsonistic discrimination may be a substantial factor behind the overall gender wage gap. On matched employer-employee data from Norway, we estimate establishment-specific wage premiums separately for men and women, conditioning...

We consider a search model of the labor market with two types of equally productive workers and two types of firms, discriminators and non-discriminators. Without policy intervention, there is wage dispersion between and within the two worker groups, but all wage differences become negligible...

The paper explains how workers' expectations of being discriminated against can be self-confirming, accounting for the persistence of unequal outcomes in the labour market even beyond the causes that originally generated them. The theoretical framework used is a two-stage game of incomplete...