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,...

We propose a competitive general equilibrium theory of gender discrimination in labor market where male and female workers are equally productive, but the female workers are deliberately paid less than the male due to subjective discrimination. Pioneering works of Becker (1957) and Arrow (1973),...

Discrimination is a pervasive aspect of modern society and human relations. Statistical discrimination theory suggests that profit-maximizing employers should use all the information about job candidates, including information about group membership (e.g., race or gender), to make accurate...

This chapter surveys the theoretical literature on statistical discrimination and affirmative action. This literature suggests different explanations for the existence and persistence of group inequality. This survey highlights such differences and describes in these contexts the effects of...

This paper investigates how an organization’s formal hierarchy affects the gender diversity in its applicant pool. One perspective based on theories of gendered organizations suggests that, because women may perceive “flat” organizational structures with few hierarchical levels as...

Women are underrepresented in economics. This underrepresentation concerns undergraduates, postgraduates, and tenured academics and increases as one climbs the academic ladder (See e.g. Ginther & Kahn 2004, Fraumenti 2010, 2009, Rask & Tiefenthaler 2008, Toivanen 2009).This paper proposes a...

We study a search model with employment protection legislation. We show that if the output from the match is uncertain ex ante, there may exist a discriminatory equilibrium where workers with the same productive characteristics are subject to different hiring standards. If a bad match takes...

We study a search model with employment protection legislation. We show that if the output from the match is uncertain ex ante, there may exist a discriminatory equilibrium where workers with the same productive characteristics are subject to different hiring standards. If a bad match takes...

This paper exploits a quasi-experiment to shed light on whether the wage penalty experienced by migrants reflects poor schooling quality in the country of education or employers' discrimination in the host country. The quasi-experiment is the possibility for migrants to undertake an official...

In this paper the extensive empirical literature on the gender wage gap is reviewed with particular attention given to the identification of the key parameters in the specified human capital wage regression models. This aspect has been of great importance in the literature chiefly for two...