Combining discrimination diagnostics to identify sources of statistical discrimination

Patricio Domínguez, Nicolas Grau and Damián Vergara

Economics Letters, 2022, vol. 212, issue C

Abstract: Statistical discrimination is usually flagged by economists as a potential source of treatment disparities. The literature, however, lacks reduced-form tests that provide information about the relative importance of statistical discrimination in explaining aggregate patterns. This article explores whether combining three different diagnostics of aggregate discrimination – those being, unconditional treatment disparities, benchmark tests, and outcome tests – can provide insights into sources of statistical discrimination. We discuss the difficulties concomitant with this exercise and argue, using an identification result that relies on restrictive (and presumably implausible) assumptions, that the answer is most likely negative.

Keywords: Discrimination; Statistical discrimination; Benchmark test; Outcome test; Prejudice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 J10 J71 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176522000131
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:212:y:2022:i:c:s0165176522000131

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110294

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().