EHP: Discrimination, Segregation and Wage Differentials in Imperfect Labor Markets

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

ABSTRACTPROPOSAL NO: 0339149INSTITUTION: Boston UniversityNSF PROGRAM: ENHANCING HUMAN PERFORMANCEPI: Lang, KevinTITLE: Discrimination, Segregation and Wage Differentials in Imperfect Labor Markets.This research project explores the causes and consequences of labor-market discrimination by profit-oriented firms. The research consists of two projectsThe firs project starts with the puzzling fact that African Americans acquire more education than do whites with the same measured cognitive ability. This project theoretically and empirically explores two explanatory hypotheses: (1) blacks attend lower quality schools. Blacks attempt to compensate for lower quality education longer years of schooling. If measured cognitive ability is influenced by education, poorer schools may be associated with smaller cognitive gains. Preliminary empirical results do not support this hypothesis. (2) Given imperfect information about worker productivity, blacks have greater incentives than whites to use education to signal their desirability as workers. To test this hypothesis, this project will explore differences in information structure for blacks and whites (employers observe the productivity of whites more readily than they do the productivity of blacks) and differences in the distribution of productivity between the two groups. The models will be tested with NLSY data. The second project addresses discrimination by profit-oriented firms that must search for workers who in turn must search for jobs. It explores the relation between segregation, wage discrimination and employment discrimination in the context of directed-search models with different types of workers. This project compares the consequences of discrimination based on skin color (a continuous factor) with those based on race (discrete categories). It will broaden our understanding of a class of search models in which profit-oriented employers recognize that higher wages attract more applicants. The approach will cast light on the effects of worker heterogeneity in such settings.This research is potentially important for broader impacts on labor market policies. Different explanations for higher levels of formal education among blacks (given measured cognitive ability) imply different policies for enhancing human performance. Employer-information hypothesis implies that blacks will over-invest in observable credentials but under-invest in unobservable skills and suggests that facilitating of information acquisition would be valuable. The school-quality hypothesis suggests that policies that increase the uniformity of school-quality standards would be more effective.