IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eecrev/v122y2020ics0014292119302156.html

Strategic gains from discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Lagerlöf, Johan N.M.

Abstract

According to a classical argument, an employer handicaps herself if basing hiring decisions on factors unrelated to productivity; therefore, discrimination is undermined by competition. This paper, in contrast, argues that being discriminatory can be a commitment device that helps an employer and its rivals to partially segment the labor market, which leads to lower wages and higher profits. Discrimination can thus be an endogenous response to competition. Indeed, the relationship between discrimination and competition can be non-monotone. Moreover, the logic suggests that a ban on wage discrimination may instead lead to discrimination in hiring.

Suggested Citation

  • Lagerlöf, Johan N.M., 2020. "Strategic gains from discrimination," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:122:y:2020:i:c:s0014292119302156
    DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.103354
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292119302156
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.103354?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Becker, Gary S., 1971. "The Economics of Discrimination," University of Chicago Press Economics Books, University of Chicago Press, edition 2, number 9780226041162.
    2. Kevin Lang & Michael Manove & William T. Dickens, 2005. "Racial Discrimination in Labor Markets with Posted Wage Offers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1327-1340, September.
    3. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pc:p:3143-3259 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Galeotti, Andrea & Moraga-González, José Luis, 2008. "Segmentation, advertising and prices," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 26(5), pages 1106-1119, September.
    5. Bulow, Jeremy I & Geanakoplos, John D & Klemperer, Paul D, 1985. "Multimarket Oligopoly: Strategic Substitutes and Complements," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 93(3), pages 488-511, June.
    6. Borjas, George J & Bronars, Stephen G, 1989. "Consumer Discrimination and Self-employment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(3), pages 581-605, June.
    7. d'Aspremont, C & Gabszewicz, Jean Jaskold & Thisse, J-F, 1979. "On Hotelling's "Stability in Competition"," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(5), pages 1145-1150, September.
    8. Black, Dan A, 1995. "Discrimination in an Equilibrium Search Model," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 13(2), pages 309-333, April.
    9. Roy, Santanu, 2000. "Strategic segmentation of a market," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 18(8), pages 1279-1290, December.
    10. Vickers, John, 1985. "Delegation and the Theory of the Firm," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 95(380a), pages 138-147, Supplemen.
    11. Jurjen J. A. Kamphorst & Otto H. Swank, 2016. "Don't Demotivate, Discriminate," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 8(1), pages 140-165, February.
    12. Chaim Fershtman & Kenneth L. Judd, 2006. "Equilibrium Incentives in Oligopoly: Corrigendum," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(4), pages 1367-1367, September.
    13. Steven D. Sklivas, 1987. "The Strategic Choice of Managerial Incentives," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 18(3), pages 452-458, Autumn.
    14. Altonji, Joseph G. & Blank, Rebecca M., 1999. "Race and gender in the labor market," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 48, pages 3143-3259, Elsevier.
    15. Leo Kaas, 2009. "Does Equal Pay Legislation Reduce Labour Market Inequality?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 111(1), pages 51-71, March.
    16. Matthew S. Goldberg, 1982. "Discrimination, Nepotism, and Long-Run Wage Differentials," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 97(2), pages 307-319.
    17. Phelps, Edmund S, 1972. "The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 659-661, September.
    18. Steinar Holden & Åsa Rosén, 2014. "Discrimination And Employment Protection," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 12(6), pages 1676-1699, December.
    19. Coate, Stephen & Loury, Glenn C, 1993. "Will Affirmative-Action Policies Eliminate Negative Stereotypes?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(5), pages 1220-1240, December.
    20. Marcin P?ski & Bal?zs Szentes, 2013. "Spontaneous Discrimination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(6), pages 2412-2436, October.
    21. Alan Manning & Ted To, 2002. "Oligopsony and Monopsonistic Competition in Labor Markets," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 16(2), pages 155-174, Spring.
    22. Paul Milgrom & Sharon Oster, 1987. "Job Discrimination, Market Forces, and the Invisibility Hypothesis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 102(3), pages 453-476.
    23. Bhaskar, V & To, Ted, 1999. "Minimum Wages for Ronald McDonald Monopsonies: A Theory of Monopsonistic Competition," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 109(455), pages 190-203, April.
    24. Michael Spence, 1973. "Job Market Signaling," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 87(3), pages 355-374.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brendan Brundage & Dan McGee & Daniele Tavani, 2026. "Theoretical Approaches in Stratification Economics," NBER Chapters, in: The Economics of Race and Stratification, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Claudine Gartenberg & George Serafeim, 2023. "Corporate Purpose in Public and Private Firms," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(9), pages 5087-5111, September.
    3. Claudine Gartenberg & Shun Yiu, 2023. "Acquisitions and Corporate Purpose," Strategy Science, INFORMS, vol. 8(4), pages 444-463, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Johan N. M. Lagerlöf, 2016. "Strategic Gains from Labor Market Discrimination," Discussion Papers 16-03, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    2. Akyol, Metin & Neugart, Michael & Pichler, Stefan, 2015. "A tradable employment quota," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 48-63.
    3. Barr & Oduro, Abena, 2000. "Ethnicity and wage determination in Ghana," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2506, The World Bank.
    4. Leo Kaas, 2009. "Does Equal Pay Legislation Reduce Labour Market Inequality?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 111(1), pages 51-71, March.
    5. Luojia Hu & Christopher Taber, 2011. "Displacement, Asymmetric Information, and HeterogeneousHuman Capital," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 113-152, January.
    6. Lanning, Jonathan A., 2014. "A search model with endogenous job destruction and discrimination: Why equal wage policies may not eliminate wage disparity," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(C), pages 55-71.
    7. Kaas, Leo & Lu, Jun, 2010. "Equal-treatment policy in a random search model with taste discrimination," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 699-709, August.
    8. Rajesh Ramachandran & Christopher Rauh, 2018. "Discrimination without taste: how discrimination can spillover and persist," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 249-274, August.
    9. Luojia Hu & Christopher Taber, 2005. "Layoffs, Lemons, Race, and Gender," NBER Working Papers 11481, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Ulf Nielsson & Herdis Steingrimsdottir, 2018. "The signalling value of education across genders," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 54(4), pages 1827-1854, June.
    11. Janssen, Simon & Tuor Sartore, Simone N. & Backes-Gellner, Uschi, 2014. "Social Attitudes on Gender Equality and Firms' Discriminatory Pay-Setting," IZA Discussion Papers 7959, IZA Network @ LISER.
    12. Noriaki Matsushima & Kazuki Nishikawa & Jiaying Qiu, 2026. "The effects of minimum wage in inter-regional duopoly competition," OSIPP Discussion Paper 26E003, Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University.
    13. Rosen, Asa, 1997. "An equilibrium search-matching model of discrimination," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(8), pages 1589-1613, August.
    14. Castro Campos, Bente, 2013. "Human capital differences or labor market discrimination? The occupational outcomes of ethnic minorities in rural Guizhou (China)," Studies on the Agricultural and Food Sector in Transition Economies, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), volume 73, number 73.
    15. Parimal K. Bag & Bibhas Saha & Shiva Sikdar, 2021. "Prejudice, bias and identity neutral policy," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 56(1), pages 173-203, January.
    16. Clémence Berson, 2016. "Local labor markets and taste-based discrimination," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 5(1), pages 1-21, December.
    17. de Bijl, P.W.J., 1995. "Strategic delegation of responsibility in competing firms," Other publications TiSEM 5320d4b8-2e72-4ef1-987f-b, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    18. Nathalie Havet, 2004. "Écarts salariaux et disparités professionnelles entre sexes : développements théoriques et validité empirique," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 80(1), pages 5-39.
    19. Barr, Abigail & Oduro, Abena, 2002. "Ethnic fractionalization in an African labour market," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(2), pages 355-379, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:122:y:2020:i:c:s0014292119302156. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eer .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.