Cross-assignment discrimination in pay: A test case of major league baseball

Őrn B. Bodvarsson, Kerry Papps and John Sessions ()

Labour Economics, 2014, vol. 28, issue C, 84-95

Abstract: The traditional Becker/Arrow style model of discrimination depicts majority and minority workers as perfectly substitutable inputs, implying that all workers have the same job assignment. The model is only appropriate for determining whether pay differences between, for example, whites and non-whites doing job assignment A are attributable to prejudice (‘within-assignment discrimination’). It is inappropriate, however, for determining whether pay differences between whites in job assignment A and non-whites in job assignment B reflect discriminatory behaviour (‘cross-assignment discrimination’). We test the model of such cross assignment discrimination developed by Bodvarsson and Sessions (2011) using data on Major League Baseball hitters and pitchers for four different seasons during the 1990s, a decade during which monopsony power fell. We find strong evidence of ceteris paribus racial pay differences between hitters and pitchers, as well as evidence that cross-assignment discrimination varies with labour market structure.

Keywords: Wage discrimination; Complementarity; Monopsony power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537114000268
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Cross-Assignment Discrimination in Pay: A Test Case of Major League Baseball (2011)
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:labeco:v:28:y:2014:i:c:p:84-95

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2014.03.007

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

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