Research
Research
Working Papers
The Cultural Trust Gap: Discriminative Trust Across England’s North-South Divide Working Paper Here
Works in Progress
(Mis)anticipated Discrimination (Job Market Paper)
In this paper, I propose and test a novel mechanism through which discrimination persists: individuals misperceive statistical discrimination as taste-based discrimination. I first derive a theoretical model of self-confirming discrimination which arises in the job-search setting to demonstrate this mechanism. I show that correctly attributing the source of discrimination leads to multiple equilibria such that arriving at inequality represents a coordination error. However, misattributing discrimination to taste-based origins leads only to a discriminatory equilibrium and reduces the perceived return to deviating from discrimination-inducing application strategies. In a pre-registered laboratory experiment, I find that subjects who experience discrimination from an ambiguous origin overestimate the probability that this inequality is caused by taste-based discriminators and this reduces the application rate of the disadvantaged group: a 1 percentage point increase in believed probability that discrimination is taste-based leads to a 0.22 percentage point decrease in the probability that a subject in the discriminated group applies to a job, perpetuating statistical discrimination. Moreover, misattribution leads to stronger perceptions of market unfairness and lower demand for affirmative action among the favoured group. This demonstrates that the misattribution of the source of discrimination can both directly and indirectly lead to sustained discrimination and inequality.
Can We Trust the Trust Game: Identifying the Effect of Inequality on Trust (with R. Caputo)
Gender Competition & Stereotypes: A General Equilibrium Framework (with M. Hilweg-Waldeck)
The Fairness of Discrimination (with S. Schweighofer-Kodritsch & E. Ø. Sørensen)
Expecting Bias: How Beliefs of Discrimination Shape The Gender Application Gap (with R. Caputo, M. Hilweg-Waldeck & A. Zednik)