The Price of Prejudice
- Author(s)
- Morten Hedegaard, Jean-Robert Tyran
- Abstract
We present a new type of field experiment to investigate ethnic prejudice in the workplace. Our design allows us to study how potential discriminators respond to changes in the cost of discrimination. We find that ethnic discrimination is common but highly responsive to the “price of prejudice”, i.e. to the opportunity cost of choosing a less productive worker on ethnic grounds. Discriminators are on average willing to forego 8 percent of their earnings to avoid a co-worker of the other ethnic type. The evidence suggests that animus rather than statistical discrimination explains observed behavior.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Economics, Vienna Center for Experimental Economics
- External organisation(s)
- University of Copenhagen
- Journal
- American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
- Volume
- 10
- Pages
- 40-63
- No. of pages
- 24
- ISSN
- 1945-7782
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20150241
- Publication date
- 01-2018
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502002 Labour economics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics, Econometrics and Finance(all)
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/the-price-of-prejudice(32b9cc68-73dd-4fe4-bbd0-18df66256d04).html