Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
机会不平等与歧视
Inequality of opportunity and discrimination
摘要
Identity-based discrimination continues to impact labor market outcomes across multiple contexts. While explicit forms of discrimination have been mitigated through policy and institutional interventions, subtle mechanisms persist. For instance, differential access to resources can lead to disparities in performance, potentially masking underlying biases. We investigate whether inequality of opportunity influences discrimination through a laboratory experiment in India, focusing on caste-based discrimination and belief updating. We introduce inequality of opportunity by exogenously varying the degree of advantage in a previously performed task. We test whether providing information about an advantage affects the likelihood of hiring potential employees across groups and whether employers update their beliefs over time. Our results indicate that, conditional on being informed about the advantages, employers initially prefer employees from their own caste. Over time, they update their beliefs about the true ability distribution, leading to statistical discrimination in favor of upper-caste employees.
中文摘要
基于身份歧视持续在多种情境下影响劳动力市场结果。尽管政策与制度干预已缓解了显性形式的歧视，隐性机制依然存在。例如，资源获取的差异可能导致绩效差距，从而可能掩盖潜在的偏见。我们通过在印度开展的一项实验室实验，研究机会不平等是否通过种姓歧视与信念更新影响歧视行为。我们通过外生改变先前完成任务中的优势程度来引入机会不平等。我们检验提供关于优势的信息是否会影响跨群体雇佣潜在雇员的可能性，以及雇主是否会随时间更新其信念。我们的结果表明，在被告知优势信息的条件下，雇主最初偏好来自其自身种姓的雇员。随着时间推移，他们会更新对真实能力分布的信念，导致偏向高种姓雇员的统计性歧视。