A New Look at Racial Profiling: Evidence from the Boston Police Department

This paper provides new evidence on the role of preference-based versus statistical discrimination in racial profiling using a unique data set that includes the race of both the driver and the officer. We first generalize the model presented in Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) and show that the fundamental insight that allows them to distinguish between statistical discrimination and preference-based discrimination depends on the specialized shapes of the best response functions in their model. Thus, the test that they employ is not robust to a range of alternative modeling assumptions. However, we also show that if statistical discrimination alone explains differences in the rate at which the vehicles of drivers of different races are searched, then search decisions should be independent of officer race. We then test this prediction using data from the Boston Police Department. Consistent with preference-based discrimination, our baseline results demonstrate that officers are more likely to conduct a search if the race of the officer differs from the race of the driver. We then investigate and rule out two alternative explanations for our findings: race-based informational asymmetries between officers and the assignment of officers to neighborhoods.

Are All the Good Men Married? Uncovering the Sources of the Marital Wage Premium

A longstanding and yet unsettled question in labor economics is: does marriage cause men's wages to rise? Cross-sectional wage studies consistently find that married men earn significantly higher wages than do men who are not currently married. However, it is well-known that inferring causal relationships from crosssectional analysis is inappropriate because of the biases introduced by unobserved heterogeneity. As a means of circumventing this problem, this paper uses data on identical twins to control for unobserved heterogeneity. Our estimates suggest that marriage increases men's wages by as much as 27%, and that little, if any, of the cross-sectional relationship between marriage and wages is due to selection. In addition, we find little evidence that the marital-wage premium is a consequence of household specialization

Risky choice in the limelight

This paper examines how risk behavior in the limelight differs from that in anonymity. In two separate experiments we find that subjects are more risk averse in the limelight. However, risky choices are similarly path dependent in the different treatments. Under both limelight and anonymous laboratory conditions, a simple prospect theory model with a path-dependent reference point provides a better explanation for subjects’ behavior than a flexible specification of expected utility theory. Additionally, our findings suggest that ambiguity aversion depends on being in the limelight, that passive experience has little effect on risk taking, and that reference points are determined by imperfectly updated expectations

Productivity, Wages, and Marriage: The Case of Major League Baseball

The effect of marriage on productivity and, consequently, wages has been long debated in economics. A primary explanation for the impact of marriage on wages has been through its impact on productivity, however, there has been no direct evidence for this. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by directly measuring the impact of marriage on productivity using a sample of professional baseball players from 1871 - 2007. Our results show that only lower ability men see an increase in productivity, though this result is sensitive to the empirical specification and weakly significant. In addition, despite the lack of any effect on productivity, high ability married players earn roughly 16 - 20 percent more than their single counterparts. We discuss possible reasons why employers may favor married men

Persistent Racial Wage Inequality

This paper attempts to understand the forces that have lead to persistent racial wage inequality by developing a dynamic model of statistical discrimination that accounts for the transmission of earnings across generations. The parameters of this model are then estimated using data from the 1970 and 1990 U.S. Census. The results indicate that racial disparities in the quality of information that firms receive about worker productivity are the primary cause of racial wage inequality in 1990. The results also indicate that neither the persistence of income across generations nor the presence of coordination failures explains a sizable fraction of ongoing inequality

Do Educated Women Make Bad Mothers? Twin Studies of the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

"Does increasing women's schooling raise the schooling of the next generation?" is the question posed by Jere Behrman and Mark Rosenzweig (2002) in their eponymous article. Their answer to the question is no. In fact, they conclude that raising women's schooling may even lower the schooling of the next generation. In this paper, we show that Behrman and Rosenzweig's results are not robust to alternative coding schemes and sample selection rules, and we show that the policy inference may be misguide

Experimentation and Job Choice

In most models in which firms and workers learn about worker productivity through repeated observations of on-the-job performance, the amount of information revealed about workers is exogenously given and constant across jobs. In this paper, we examine what happens when the amount of information gathered about workers can be altered by assigning workers to different jobs. We show that informational differences across jobs naturally give rise to experimentation. That is, there is a trade off between current period output in order assign workers to jobs that reveal a substantial amount of information workers’ skills. We find that while experimentation is the most valuable when workers are young and inexperienced, the optimal level of experimentation is initially very small, rises as workers gain experience and then eventually declines. As a result, our model suggests that wage growth may be driven partly by a decline in experimentation as workers age. We also show that random productivity shocks can have long-lasting and, in some cases, permanent effects on both wages and wage growth.