Natural Groups and Economic Characteristics as Driving Forces of Wage Discrimination

Thorsten Chmura (), Sebastian Goerg and Pia Weiss ()

No wp2016_04_01, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Florida State University

Abstract: We investigate whether the origin of an employee provides different motives for wage discrimination in gift-exchange experiments with students and migrant workers in China. In a lab and an internet experiment, subjects in the role of employers can condition their wages on the employees? home provinces. The resulting systematic differences in wages can be linked to natural groups and economic characteristics of the provinces. In-group favoritism increases wages for employees who share the same origin as the employer, while an increased probability of being matched with an employee with a different ethnicity reduces wages. Furthermore, wages in the laboratory increase with the actual wage level in the employees? home province. Nevertheless, employees? effort is not influenced by these variables; only the wage paid in the experiment influences effort.

Keywords: wages; discrimination; social identity; natural groups; lab experiment; gift-exchange; migrant-workers; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 J31 J71 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://coss.fsu.edu/econpapers/wpaper/wp2016_04_01.pdf First version, 2016-04 (application/pdf)
https://coss.fsu.edu/econpapers/wpaper/wp2016_04_01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Natural groups and economic characteristics as driving forces of wage discrimination (2016)
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:fsu:wpaper:wp2016_04_01

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, Florida State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Luke Rodgers ().