We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
Biased Screening and Discrimination in the Labor Market.
- Authors
Borjas, George J.; Goldberg, Matthew S.
- Abstract
Statistical discrimination models have provided an explanation of why information on race is rationally taken into account by profit-maximizing employers. We have expanded the analysis by considering the case in which the firm uses a screening process which does not provide perfect information on an applicant's productivity and which is biased against members of a particular race group. We considered the two consequences of this bias on the screening process: First, the bias might result in one race group (for concreteness, blacks) obtaining lower scores despite the fact that the productivity distribution is invariant to race. Secondly, the bias might also affect the quality of the test in the sense that black scores would be less reliable measures of productivity. It was shown that by introducing the realistic concept of screening bias, wage differentials between black and white workers could be explained without recourse to assumptions of differential ability distributions across groups.
- Subjects
EMPLOYEE screening; LABOR market; EMPLOYMENT discrimination; RACE discrimination; WAGE differentials; WAGES &; labor productivity
- Publication
American Economic Review, 1978, Vol 68, Issue 5, p918
- ISSN
0002-8282
- Publication type
Article