A General Framework for Fair Regression

Fairness, through its many forms and definitions, has become an important issue facing the machine learning community. In this work, we consider how to incorporate group fairness constraints in kernel regression methods, applicable to Gaussian processes, support vector machines, neural network regression and decision tree regression. Further, we focus on examining the effect of incorporating these constraints in decision tree regression, with direct applications to random forests and boosted trees amongst other widespread popular inference techniques. We show that the order of complexity of memory and computation is preserved for such models and tightly bound the expected perturbations to the model in terms of the number of leaves of the trees. Importantly, the approach works on trained models and hence can be easily applied to models in current use and group labels are only required on training data.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 2 pages reference

Macro- and microeconomic consequences of wage rigidity

An exploration of the micro- and macroeconomic theories, implications, and evidence of wage rigidity from the perspective of human resource managers and economic researchers, showing that human resource policies can subtly alter the rigidity of wages.Unemployment ; Wages

Lower and Upper Bounds of Unfair Inequality: Theory and Evidence for Germany and the US

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which additionally allows identifying an upper bound. We illustrate our approach by comparing Germany and the US based on harmonized micro data. We find significant and robust differences between lower and upper bound estimates - both for gross and net earnings based either on periodical or permanent income - for both countries. We discuss the cross-country differences and similarities in IOp in the light of differences in social mobility and persistence.Equality of opportunity, fairness, redistribution, wage inequality