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)

Over the last half century, attitudes towards integration, diversity and equal opportunities have increased and yet beliefs of discrimination incidence have been stable. In this paper, I propose that individuals overestimate the prevalence of taste-based discrimination, thus sustaining beliefs of discrimination incidence. I develop a theoretical model to show that by anticipating discrimination, individuals condition their job application decision on their identity resulting in the realisation of discrimination. The equilibrium application and hiring strategies are identical when employers are information-constrained and Bayesian and when they inhibit taste-based discrimination, potentially leading workers to misattribute discrimination to taste-based sources when the employer is of the former. I demonstrate that misattribution may be due to cursed strategic misperceptions: individuals fail to internalise that other workers condition their application decisions on their identity and thus fail to see the rationality in statistical discrimination. Misattributing the source of discrimination particularly sustains discriminatory outcomes, as individuals fail to recognise that their own beliefs, and not employer animus, drive these patterns, causing them to undervalue deviating from their application strategies. In an experiment, I show that individuals over-attribute discriminatory outcomes to taste-based sources and that they underestimate the degree to which others respond to such beliefs, leading to persistent discrimination. I analyse the consequences of misattribution of discrimination to explore the potential distortions to the demand for anti-discriminatory policies and fairness perceptions of the labour market.

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)