This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights and empirical findings concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of...

Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001) develop a model of police search and offender behavior. Their model implies that if police are unprejudiced the rate of guilt should not vary across groups. Using data from Interstate 95 in Maryland, they find equal guilt rates for African-Americans and whites...

The literature contains ambiguous findings as to whether statistical discrimination, e.g. in the form of racial profiling, causes a reduction in deterrence. These analyses, however, assume that enforcers' incentives are exogenously fixed. This article demonstrates that when the costs and...

Several studies using observational data suggest that ethnic discrimination increases in downturns of the economy. We investigate whether ethnic discrimination depends on labor market tightness using data from correspondence studies. We utilize three correspondence studies of the Swedish labor...

For almost 50 years field experiments have been used to study ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring decisions, consistently reporting high rates of discrimination against minority applicants - including immigrants -, irrespective of time, location, or minority groups tested. While Riach and...

This paper shows how difficult it is to study the roles of discrimination and unobserved skills when studying changes in racial and gender wage gaps over time by examining merits and shortcomings of a popular decomposition method by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991). The JMP method shows that wage...

Correspondence tests have been used by scholars and civil rights organizations to measure ethnic discrimination. In contrast to research testing covering a whole market through many discrimination tests, litigation testing typically targets a single agent, which can only be tested through a very...

Purpose – Research has shown that employers often disfavor racial minorities - particularly African Americans - even when whites and minorities present comparable resumes when applying for jobs. Extant studies have been hard pressed to distinguish between taste-based discrimination where...

This paper considers a dynamic economy in which agents are repeatedly matched with one another and decide whether to enter into profitable partnerships. Each agent has a physical colour and a social colour. The social colour of an agent acts as a signal about the physical colour of agents in his...

I present a theory of assimilation in a heterogeneous society composed of two groups with distinct social norms and unequal statuses. Members of the group with a relatively disadvantaged status face an incentive to assimilate, embracing the norms of the more advantaged group. The cost of...