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The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism
... The differences in wages between men and women are explained by a number of theories. However, researchers most often refer to (1) human capital theory (Becker, 1964;Mincer, 1974;Schultz, 1961); (2) discrimination theory (Aigner, Cain, 1977;Arrow, 1974;Becker, 1957;Milgrom, Oster, 1987;Phelps, 1972); (3) the theory of preferences (Charles, Grusky, 2004;Hakim, 1998Hakim, , 2004Hakim, , 2006. ...
Research background
The unadjusted gender pay gap (GPG) is one of the indicators that measure progress towards SDG5. There is considerable variability in the values of this indicator among the individual countries and regions of the EU. However, due to the effects resulting from the neighbouring economies’ interactions, spatial autocorrelation (SA) should be taken into account when analysing these indicators, especially at the regional level.
Purpose
The main aim of the analysis is the identification of SA of the GPG across the EU countries and macroregions.
Research methodology
The analysis covers Eurostat data from the Structure of Earnings Survey. Global Moran’s I and Geary’s C , and local Moran’s I are used to examine SA.
The results
The results show that there is no SA of the GPG in EU countries, but for the macroregions level, are identified regions where this type of autocorrelation does exist. This means that for analysed phenomenon geographical proximity is only relevant in selected areas of the EU. These differences may be due to the uneven distribution of economic activities and related infrastructure, the education and skills of the labour force or population movements. This, in turn, leads directly to different wage levels and different levels of the GPG.
Novelty
Research on the GPG is dominated by approaches that do not take spatial relationships into account. This analysis complements the few studies to date that take into account the SA of the GPG regions across the EU.
... Before Phelps, economists had already noted higher unemployment rates among women and ethnic minorities in America, partially attributing this to discrimination. Phelps (1972b) also argued that employers rationally used race and gender as proxies for productivity, reflecting social inequalities-producing different labour market responses where women often withdrew and ethnic minorities accepted temporary, low-paying jobs. This phenomenon, became known as the discouraged worker effect, sometimes incorporated scarring metaphors (Schweitzer and Smith 1974). ...
Unemployment scarring has been adopted as a key concept in social policy, and despite being variously defined and inadequately theorised, it is widely used to justify the administration of labour market activation policies. Herein, we develop a critical genealogy of scarring, exploring a recently crystallised concept that amalgamates empirical work on labour detachments, discouraged workers, signalling, reservation wage fluctuation, and hysteresis; then yokes this distinct formulation together with behavioural economics research on the psychological impacts of unemployment. Scarring as translated into social policy is cleaved from the complexity of its labour market economic origins, particularly methodological limitations, and becomes an evocative shorthand, a black‐box explanation of unemployment. Our genealogy suggests that scarring is not conceptually robust enough to support and justify activation and workfare, and more broadly, explores the complex relationship of policy problems and policy solutions.
... Still, it is possible that some users benefit, and others suffer from the recent development. According to Phelps (1972) and Chakravarty (2006, 422-424), unintended discrimination by peripheral location could emerge. ...
... The applications of the main results span multiple fields. In the economic literature on discrimination (Becker, 2010;Phelps, 1972;Arrow, 1973;Bartoš et al., 2016;Onuchic, 2022), the findings clarify how non-discrimination constraints shape behavior for an individual with limited attention. Moreover, this paper provides a general framework that encompasses stateindependent (i.e., unconditional) quotas, state-contingent quotas, and relative quotas. ...
This paper studies the behavior of a rationally inattentive individual whose choices are subject to constraints. These constraints may arise from budget limitations, privacy regulations , social norms, or non-discriminatory policies (e.g., hiring quotas). Each constraint restricts the set of available attention strategies. I solve the constrained rational inattention problem and show that the optimal attention strategy induces stochastic choice behavior, with choice probabilities belonging to a generalized exponential family. Each constraint introduces a distortion parameter that adjusts the utility of actions. The parameters associated with these constraints have sensitivity interpretations and offer insights into how the constraints affect likelihood ratios and information acquisition. I derive the value function for the constrained problem to characterize the welfare cost of these constraints, showing that it is bounded by the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the unconstrained and constrained choice probabilities, plus a term reflecting the tightness of the constraints. I apply the results to study optimal behavior and welfare under budget constraints, absolute and relative hiring quotas, conformity preferences, and privacy-preserving restrictions.
This study investigates the role of two mechanisms – perceived workers’ performance and commitment – in shaping the career opportunities of teleworkers and office-based workers in the post-pandemic context of the United Kingdom. We outline a theoretical framework that integrates economic and sociological literature on work from home (WFH) and careers, and accounts for workers’ gender and parenthood obligations. We test it utilizing data from a discrete choice experiment conducted between July and December 2022 with 937 managers. Our findings reveal that hybrid workers face poorer career prospects than office-based workers because managers perceive them as underperforming. Among full-time teleworkers, reduced career opportunities stem not only from managers’ perceptions of their job performance but also from assumptions that full-time teleworkers are less committed to work. Finally, we demonstrate disparate impacts on promotion and earning opportunities based on gender and parenthood, primarily due to differing employer perceptions regarding work performance and commitment.
Most economists think family economics began in the 1960s when price theory was applied to family behaviour. Instead, this book focuses on enduring concerns with family poverty across the last two centuries. In nineteenth-century Britain and Europe, economists debated the effects of poverty relief and sought to improve family productivity. In the US, interwar household consumer economists studied how to rationalise family consumption, because factories were producing goods for low-income families. From the 1960s onwards, 'New' household economists attributed family poverty to inadequate human capital investment in predominantly non-white families. Even when feminist, development, and queer economists problematised gendered injustices, they recentred family poverty, targeting the 'pauperisation' of motherhood and the marginalisation of 'families we choose.' Economics and the Family does not simply reconstruct this alternate history, it also shows how economists in all these periods overlooked injustices which must be shouldered today.
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