Research on the Economics of Discrimination: New Empirical Methods, Theory and Applications

种族和性别差异在许多领域都有记录，包括就业、保健、抵押贷款和其他贷款情况、机动车拦截和搜查以及其他执法情况，如陪审团的选择、起诉和判刑。造成所观察到的种族和性别差异的两个最重要的原因是种族/性别偏见和统计歧视。“偏见”一词是指“决策者”(即雇主、医生、贷款人、警官、法官等)所产生的心理效用差异。在对“受助者”(求职者、病人等)做出决定时当接受治疗的人有不同的种族和性别时。相比之下，“统计歧视”一词指的是“决策者”仅仅因为种族和性别特征中包含的合法信息而对不同种族和性别的“被对待者”有不同看法的情况。讨论了两个重要且相关的问题。首先，在观察到的种族/性别差异中，如何区分种族/性别偏见和统计歧视的作用？第二，在通过例如平权行动政策缩小差距的尝试中，有哪些潜在的问题需要注意？研究人员开发了新的实证方法和理论以及新的实证应用来解决这些问题。在这项提案的第一个项目中，调查员提出了一个统一和一般的框架，以正式调查在哪些条件下可以区分偏见和统计歧视造成的差异。一般框架允许研究人员正式评估文献中许多现有测试的有效性，并允许他们提出有效的经验性测试。在该提案的第二个项目中，研究人员建议并经验性地实施一项基于结果的测试，以检验急诊科医生中偏见的作用，该测试基于急诊科首次就诊的患者在一些诊断测试后出院的反弹率。这一经验性的应用对我们理解医疗保健机会和健康结果方面的巨大种族差异是一种新的贡献。在第三个项目中，研究人员分析了政策制定者--他对增加工作场所的种族和/或性别多样性感兴趣--通常必须将招聘决定委托给代理人，而委托人和代理人的目标可能相互冲突，这一事实可能会导致潜在的问题。文中提出了两个重要问题。第一，平权行动问题的授权决定和利益冲突方面如何影响平权行动目标的实现？第二，校长可能采取哪些潜在的策略来缓解这些问题？鉴于种族和性别差异的重要性，以及现有的平权行动努力缩小这种差异，这项调查将为关于种族和性别平等问题的社会话语带来许多新的理论见解、经验方法和事实。

Racial and gender disparities have been documented in many areas, including employment, health care, mortgage and other lending situations, motor vehicle stops and searches as well as in other scenarios of law enforcement such as jury selection, prosecution and sentencing. Two of the most important causes for the observed racial and gender disparities are racial/gender prejudice and statistical discrimination. The term "prejudice'' refers to the presence of a psychic utility differential accrued by "the decision-makers" (i.e. the employers, the doctors, the lenders, the police officers, the judges etc.) in making their decisions on "the treated" (the job applicant, the patient, etc.) when the treated have different races and genders. In contrast, the term "statistical discrimination" refers to a scenario in which the "decision-makers" see "the treated" with dissimilar races and genders differently only because of the legitimate information that is contained in race and gender characteristics. Two important and related questions are addressed. First, how can one distinguish the roles of racial/gender bias from that of statistical discrimination in the observed racial/gender disparities? Second, what are potential issues to be aware of in the attempts via, e.g. affirmative action policies, to reduce the disparities? The investigators develop new empirical methods and theory as well as new empirical applications to address these questions. In the first project of this proposal, the investigators propose a unified and general framework to formally investigate the conditions under which disparities caused by prejudice and statistical discrimination can be distinguished. The general framework allows the investigators to formally assess the validity of many existing tests in the literature, and also permits them to propose valid empirical tests. In the second project of the proposal, the investigators suggest and empirically implement an outcome-based test for the role of prejudice among emergency department physicians based on the bounceback rates of patients who are discharged from their initial emergency department (ED) visit upon some diagnostic tests. This empirical application is a new contribution to our understanding of the large racial disparities in health care access and health outcomes. In a third project, the researchers analyze the potential problems caused by the fact that a policy-maker - who is interested in increasing racial and/or gender diversity in the workplace - typically has to delegate the hiring decisions to an agent, and the principal and the agent may have conflicting objectives. Two important questions are addressed. First, how do the delegation decision and conflict of interest aspects of the affirmative action problem affect the achievement of affirmative action goals? Two, what are the potential strategies that the principal may adopt to alleviate these problems? Given the importance of racial and gender disparities, as well as existing affirmative action efforts to reduce such disparities, this investigation will bring many new theoretical insights, empirical methods and facts to the social discourse on issues of racial and gender equality.