The Heterogeneous Effect of Affirmative Action on Performance

Anat Bracha, Alma Cohen and Lynn Conell-Price

No 25322, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper experimentally investigates the effect of gender-based affirmative action (AA) on performance in the lab, focusing on a tournament environment. The tournament is based on GRE math questions commonly used in graduate school admission, and at which women are known to perform worse on average than men. We find heterogeneous effect of AA on female participants: AA lowers the performance of high-ability women and increases the performance of low-ability women. Our results are consistent with two possible mechanisms—one is that AA changes incentives differentially for low- and high-ability women, and the second is that AA triggers stereotype threat.

JEL-codes: C91 I28 J16 J78 K19 K31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-law
Note: ED LE LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Anat Bracha & Alma Cohen & Lynn Conell-Price, 2018. "The heterogeneous effect of affirmative action on performance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25322.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The heterogeneous effect of affirmative action on performance (2019)
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:nbr:nberwo:25322

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25322

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().