In the labor market, statistical discrimination occurs when employers' beliefs about workers' behavior induce different groups of workers to invest at different rates in their education. Thus, even though groups may be identical ex-ante, the beliefs of the employers are self-fulfilling....

This paper studies incentives for the interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Considered are unfair contests, i.e., contests in which, subject to activity conditions, one player (the favorite) is interim always more likely to win than the other...

A standard hidden information model is considered to study the influence of the a priori productivity distribution on the optimal contract. A priori more productive (hazard rate dominant) agents work less, enjoy lower rents, but generate a higher expected surplus.

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...

We test if firms statistically discriminate workers based on race when employer learning is asymmetric. Using data from the NLSY79, we find evidence of asymmetric employer learning. In addition, employers statistically discriminate against non-college educated black workers at time of hiring. We...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Provided that the contest is uniformly asymmetric, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome. This is so because the weakest type of the...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests with two-sided incomplete information. Private information may concern marginal cost, valuations, and ability. Our main result says that, if the contest is uniformly...

This paper offers a new theory of discrimination in the workplace. We consider a manager who has to assign two tasks to two employees. The manager has superior information about the employees' abilities. We show that besides an equilibrium where the manager does not discriminate, equilibria...

A standard hidden information model is considered to study the influence of the a priori productivity distribution on the optimal contract. A priori more productive (hazard rate dominant) agents work less, enjoy lower rents, but generate a higher expected surplus.

We study a dynamic model of team production with moral hazard. We show that the players begin to invest effort only shortly before the time limit when the reward for solving the task is shared equally. We explore how the team can design contracts to mitigate this form of procrastination and show...