IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/labeco/v17y2010i4p699-709.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Equal-treatment policy in a random search model with taste discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Kaas, Leo
  • Lu, Jun

Abstract

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 when the taste for discrimination is small. We analyze the effect of an equal-pay policy, both in combination with affirmative action and without. When equal opportunity of hiring cannot be enforced, wage dispersion increases and wages for minority workers fall substantially relative to laissez faire. Sometimes also the wage gap between worker groups widens in response to the policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Kaas, Leo & Lu, Jun, 2010. "Equal-treatment policy in a random search model with taste discrimination," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 699-709, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:17:y:2010:i:4:p:699-709
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927-5371(10)00003-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Welch, Finis, 1976. "Employment Quotas for Minorities," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(4), pages 105-139, August.
    2. Audra J. Bowlus & Zvi Eckstein, 2002. "Discrimination and Skill Differences in an Equilibrium Search Model," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 43(4), pages 1309-1345, November.
    3. David Neumark & Roy J. Bank & Kyle D. Van Nort, 1996. "Sex Discrimination in Restaurant Hiring: An Audit Study," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(3), pages 915-941.
    4. P. A. Riach & J. Rich, 2002. "Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(483), pages 480-518, November.
    5. Black, Dan A, 1995. "Discrimination in an Equilibrium Search Model," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 13(2), pages 309-333, April.
    6. Asa Rosen, 2003. "Search, Bargaining, and Employer Discrimination," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 21(4), pages 807-830, October.
    7. Lundberg, Shelly J & Startz, Richard, 1983. "Private Discrimination and Social Intervention in Competitive Labor Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(3), pages 340-347, June.
    8. Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2004. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(4), pages 991-1013, September.
    9. Coate, Stephen & Loury, Glenn C, 1993. "Will Affirmative-Action Policies Eliminate Negative Stereotypes?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(5), pages 1220-1240, December.
    10. David Neumark & Harry Holzer, 2000. "Assessing Affirmative Action," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 38(3), pages 483-568, September.
    11. Bisping, Timothy O & Fain, James R, 2000. "Job Queues, Discrimination, and Affirmative Action," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 38(1), pages 123-135, January.
    12. Shi, Shouyong, 2006. "Wage differentials, discrimination and efficiency," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 849-875, May.
    13. Kevin Lang & Michael Manove & William T. Dickens, 2005. "Racial Discrimination in Labor Markets with Posted Wage Offers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1327-1340, September.
    14. Burdett, Kenneth & Judd, Kenneth L, 1983. "Equilibrium Price Dispersion," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(4), pages 955-969, July.
    15. Burdett, Kenneth & Mortensen, Dale T, 1998. "Wage Differentials, Employer Size, and Unemployment," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(2), pages 257-273, May.
    16. David Neumark & Wendy A. Stock, 2001. "The Effects of Race and Sex Discrimination Laws," NBER Working Papers 8215, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Leo Kaas, 2009. "Does Equal Pay Legislation Reduce Labour Market Inequality?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 111(1), pages 51-71, March.
    18. Phelps, Edmund S, 1972. "The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 659-661, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Akyol, Metin & Neugart, Michael & Pichler, Stefan, 2015. "A tradable employment quota," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 48-63.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Akyol, Metin & Neugart, Michael & Pichler, Stefan, 2015. "A tradable employment quota," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 48-63.
    2. Ali Ahmed & Mats Hammarstedt, 2020. "Ethnic discrimination in contacts with public authorities: a correspondence test among Swedish municipalities," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(17), pages 1391-1394, October.
    3. Steinar Holden & Åsa Rosén, 2014. "Discrimination And Employment Protection," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 12(6), pages 1676-1699, December.
    4. Roland G. Fryer, Jr. & Devah Pager & Jörg L. Spenkuch, 2013. "Racial Disparities in Job Finding and Offered Wages," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 56(3), pages 633-689.
    5. Leo Kaas, 2009. "Does Equal Pay Legislation Reduce Labour Market Inequality?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 111(1), pages 51-71, March.
    6. Luca Flabbi, 2010. "Gender Discrimination Estimation In A Search Model With Matching And Bargaining," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 51(3), pages 745-783, August.
    7. Kevin Lang & Jee-Yeon K. Lehmann, 2012. "Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market: Theory and Empirics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 50(4), pages 959-1006, December.
    8. Nathalie Havet & Catherine Sofer, 2008. "Why Do Women's Wages Increase So Slowly Throughout Their Career? A Dynamic Model of Statistical Discrimination," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 22(2), pages 291-314, June.
    9. Souleymane Mbaye, 2019. "Trois évaluations d’actions de lutte contre les discriminations," Erudite Ph.D Dissertations, Erudite, number ph19-01 edited by Pascale Petit.
    10. Havet, Nathalie, 2004. "Écarts salariaux et disparités professionnelles entre sexes : développements théoriques et validité empirique," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 80(1), pages 5-39, Mars.
    11. Guha, Brishti & Roy Chowdhury, Prabal, 2022. "Affirmative action in the presence of income heterogeneity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 510-533.
    12. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pc:p:3143-3259 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Daniel Fershtman & Alessandro Pavan, 2021. ""Soft" Affirmative Action and Minority Recruitment," American Economic Review: Insights, American Economic Association, vol. 3(1), pages 1-18, March.
    14. Barron, Kai & Ditlmann, Ruth & Gehrig, Stefan & Schweighofer-Kodritsch, Sebastian, 2020. "Explicit and implicit belief-based gender discrimination: A hiring experiment," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change SP II 2020-306, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    15. Clémence Berson, 2016. "Local labor markets and taste-based discrimination," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 5(1), pages 1-21, December.
    16. Eleonora Patacchini & Giuseppe Ragusa & Yves Zenou, 2015. "Unexplored dimensions of discrimination in Europe: homosexuality and physical appearance," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 28(4), pages 1045-1073, October.
    17. Kuhn, Florian & Chanci, Luis, 2024. "Racial disparities in labor outcomes: The effects of hiring discrimination over the business cycle," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 801-817.
    18. Borowczyk-Martins, Daniel & Bradley, Jake & Tarasonis, Linas, 2018. "Racial discrimination in the U.S. labor market: Employment and wage differentials by skill," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 45-66.
    19. Lagerlöf, Johan N.M., 2020. "Strategic gains from discrimination," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    20. Barr & Oduro, Abena, 2000. "Ethnicity and wage determination in Ghana," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2506, The World Bank.
    21. Lepage, Louis Pierre, 2020. "Endogenous learning and the persistence of employer biases in the labor market," CLEF Working Paper Series 24, Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Search model Wage dispersion Discrimination Equal-pay policy;

    JEL classification:

    • J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
    • J78 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Public Policy (including comparable worth)

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:17:y:2010:i:4:p:699-709. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/labeco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.