IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v71y2019i4p930-951..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The incentive and efficiency effects of affirmative action: does envy matter?

Author

Listed:
  • Rezina Sultana

Abstract

This paper introduces envy into the study of affirmative action (AA) policies. Envy is defined as occurring when people have the same income with different abilities or with equal abilities have different incomes because of unequal access to employment opportunities—which occurs both under adverse and compensatory-discrimination. I analyse how envy, when there is discrimination, interacts with incentive for individuals to make productivity-enhancing investment and thereby affects economic efficiency. A policymaker maximizes the expected utility of the population taking into account the trade-off between fairness or equity (no-envy) and efficiency. An exclusive equal opportunity policy (EOP) that forestalls envy would allocate skilled jobs in a manner skewed towards the historically advantaged group. I study the conditions under which AA is fairness-improving in access to ‘good’ jobs and the implications for efficiency in job allocation between ex ante advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

Suggested Citation

  • Rezina Sultana, 2019. "The incentive and efficiency effects of affirmative action: does envy matter?," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 71(4), pages 930-951.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:71:y:2019:i:4:p:930-951.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpy070
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines
    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    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:oup:oxecpp:v:71:y:2019:i:4:p:930-951.. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    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.