This article investigates how lack of information may bias the investigator's assessment of the presence of statistical discrimination. We show that the nature of the bias is such that statistical discrimination may be rejected in a Mincerian regression even when the data is generated from an...

We use a simple model of statistical discrimination to empirically disentangle two different sources of racial wage inequality: differences in the distribution of pre-market factors that affect human capital, and differences in incentives to acquire human capital when young. We show how the...

We consider an environment with asymmetric information about preferences for a public good and a private good. If the public good must be financed from contributions made by participants and if participants must be given incentives to participate in the mechanism, we show that there are...

This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods when agents' valuations are private information. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we characterize the optimal mechanism, and show that it involves bundling. Bundling alleviates the...

In incomplete information environments with transferable utility, efficient outcomes are generally implementable unless interim or ex post participation constraints are imposed on the problem. In this paper we show that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but possibly unrelated...

This paper shows that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but unrelated social decisions can achieve approximate efficiency. We provide regularity conditions under which a Groves mechanism amended with a veto game implements an efficient outcome with probability arbitrarily close...

We provide a simple proof of the equivalence between ex ante and ex post budget balance constraints in Bayesian mechanism design with independent types when participation decisions are made at the interim stage. The result is given an interpretation in terms of efficient allocation of risk.

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...