judicial ingroup bias in the shadow of terrorism we study ingroup bias the preferential treatment of members of one s own group in naturally occurring data where economically signi cant allocation decisions are made under a strong non discriminatory norm data come from rulings in israeli small claims courts during 2000 04 a period characterized by intense ethnically based terrorism our analysis exploits the essentially random assignment of cases to judges jewish or arab and the exogeneity of terrorist attacks with respect to the legal procedure evidence suggests the existence of substantial bias a claim is around 15 more likely to be accepted if assigned to a judge of the same ethnicity as the plainti furthermore we nd that this bias increases with the intensity of terrorism in the vicinity of the court during the period preceding the ruling the results are consistent with existing theory and lab evidence according to which salience of group membership enhances social identi cation

strike three discrimination incentives and evaluation major league baseball umpires express their racial ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race ethnicity but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment e g fastballs over home plate when they anticipate bias these direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward the results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups behavior generally they imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination

are tenured judges insulated from political pressure tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be insulated from political pressure and as a result indifferent to the concerns of the electorate we investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by senior english judges between 1985 and 2005 throughout this period the popular view was one of ill disciplined elitism senior judges were alleged to be favouring candidates from elite backgrounds over their equally capable non elite counterparts we find evidence in support of this view to be surprisingly weak most of the unconditional difference in promotion prospects between the two groups can simply be explained by differences in promotion relevant characteristics we then exploit an unexpected proposal to remove control over promotions from the judiciary and find that judges behaviour dramatically changed when faced by the prospect of losing autonomy senior judges began to favour non elite candidates as well as candidates who were unconnected to members of the promotion committee

taste based or statistical discrimination the economics of discrimination returns to its roots we briefly review the evolution of empirical work on discrimination we discuss why traditional regression based approaches neither convincingly measure market discrimination nor disentangle the relative importance of animus versus statistical discrimination in explaining such discrimination as exists we describe the development of modern correspondence studies we argue that these studies have the promise to credibly identify the presence of discrimination if not its magnitude can inform us about the underlying mechanism generating discrimination and can also point to avenues for new theoretical and empirical work on discrimination we discuss two articles with exemplary applications of these new methods at least since becker 1957 economists have been deeply interested in the presence of discrimination in markets in the 1970s and into the 1980s there was an active debate in the literature about whether discrimination was better described by becker s taste based discrimination model or by arrow and phelps statistical discrimination model that debate gave way to a theoretical literature that advanced each model separately and to an empirical literature focused on documenting the presence of disparities and the effects of policies designed to counteract discrimination only recently has the literature returned to the question of whether taste based or statistical discrimination is a more appropriate description of the phenomenon the two articles that follow are good examples of the move towards an understanding of the mechanisms underlying discrimination in this article we attempt to place the literature s recent direction into context and to show how it is a natural place for economists studying discrimination to arrive given where we began in the economics of discrimination becker explored ways in which individual tastes for discrimination might interact in a market setting to produce discriminatory outcomes for market participants becker described three models each considering a different source of discriminatory tastes employers co workers and customers the economics of discrimination included deep insights about discrimination becker clarified the distinction between individual tastes for discrimination and market discrimination he clarified the difference between segregation and market discrimination and he showed how the market might produce incentives for those with discriminatory tastes to avoid interaction with those towards whom they harbour animus 1

racial discrimination and professional basketball salaries in the 1990s racial differences in professional basketball player salaries are examined to determine whether the 20 premium paid to whites in the mid 1980s has persisted into the 1990s ols and tobit regressions indicate no difference between white and black salaries controlling for player and team characteristics for the 1994 95 season however censored quantile regressions show substantial racial differences at certain points in the salary distribution whites earn less than blacks at the lower end of the distribution although the difference is not statistically significant and varies with minutes played in contrast whites receive a significant premium 18 at the upper end of the salary distribution these findings are consistent with a form of consumer discrimination in which sports fans prefer to see white star players all else equal

anonymous job applications of fresh ph d economists abstract this paper analyzes anonymous job applications of ph d economists in the academic job market we use data on interview invitations from a randomized experiment at a european based research institution results show that the underrepresented gender was hurt by anonymous applications

identifying changes in the spatial distribution of crime evidence from a referee experiment in the national football league between the 2009 2010 and 2010 2011 seasons the national football league nfl repositioned one of its officials in order to prevent injuries among officials this creates a quasi experiment for studying how a change in the extent of policing affects detection of offenses using play by play data from the 2009 2010 and 2010 2011 nfl season i estimate how the detection of offensive holding changes when the positioning of an official changes i find that there is approximately a 20 increase in the number of offensive holding penalties called after the nfl repositioned the official penalties called on defensive linemen fell as a result of the repositioning overall there was no change in the total number of penalties called using the estimated change in the probability of a penalty i estimate the probability of an official calling a penalty i infer that nfl officials detect approximately 60 of crimes committed on the field jel k4 z0 d0

exploring the impact of permitting and local regulatory processes on residential solar prices in the united states abstract this article statistically isolates the impacts of city level permitting and other local regulatory processes on residential pv prices in the united states we combine data from two scoring mechanisms that independently capture local regulatory process efficiency with the largest dataset of installed pv prices in the united states we find that variations in local permitting procedures can lead to differences in average residential pv prices of approximately 0 18 w between the jurisdictions with the least favorable and most favorable permitting procedures between jurisdictions with scores across the middle 90 of the range i e 5th percentile to 95th percentile the difference is 0 14 w equivalent to a 700 2 2 difference in system costs for a typical 5 kw residential pv installation when considering variations not only in permitting practices but also in other local regulatory procedures price differences grow to 0 64 0 93 w between the least favorable and most favorable jurisdictions between jurisdictions with scores across the middle 90 of the range the difference is equivalent to a price impact of at least 2500 8 for a typical 5 kw residential pv installation these results highlight the magnitude of cost reduction that might be expected from streamlining local regulatory regimes

policy changes in major league baseball improved agent behavior and ancillary productivity outcomes offense in major league baseball mlb has decreased substantially since 2006 often attributed to increased testing and punitive action for use of performance enhancing drugs however there has been concurrent policy change affecting behavior of other league agents that may have also affected game play i therefore examine the effect of these agents mlb umpires on offensive production in baseball estimates reveal that a substantial portion of the offensive reduction from 2008 through 2014 can be attributed to changes in the size of the strike zone implications are further discussed in the context of firm production relevant outcomes as they relate to the labor force and supervisor performance expectations jel j44 z22 z28 l25

race and employment outcomes evidence from nba coaches we study the impact of management diversity on employment outcomes using data on nba head coaches that includes information on the race of each coach and his supervisor we find that a supervisor is more likely to hire a coach of his own race we also find that black coaches are less likely to be rehired to a second job within three years than their white counterparts and that a head coach s race affects the quality of the opportunities he is offered these findings are stronger for first time coaches than experienced coaches suggesting that observable information on performance mitigates bias jel j0 j4 j7

racial discrimination in umpire voting an arguably unexpected result abstractusing data from an official most valuable player award in professional sport we test for the presence of discrimination by match officials umpires who are responsible for ranking the top three players within each match these umpires are found to award significantly more votes to and have a higher probability of voting for players identified as australian indigenous after controlling for within match production the result offers further evidence on racial discrimination and runs counter to numerous analogous studies both in sport as well as in labour and other socio economic outcomes in general

the economic design of sporting contests what is the optimal number of entrants in a race or the optimal number of teams in a baseball league what is the optimal structure of prizes for a golf tournament or degree of revenue sharing for a football championship how evenly balanced should the competing teams be in the nascar or formula one championships what is the maximum number of entrants per nation to the olympic games that should be permitted what quota of qualifying teams to the soccer world cup should be allocated to the developing nations

a natural experiment on discrimination in elections abstract we exploit a natural experiment to study discrimination in elections in illinois republican presidential primaries voters vote for delegates bound to presidential candidates but delegates names convey information about their race and gender we identify discrimination from variation in vote totals among delegates bound to the same presidential candidate and who face the same voters examining delegate vote totals from 2000 to 2016 we estimate nonwhite delegates receive 9 fewer votes we find essentially no gender discrimination negligible incentives for statistical discrimination costs to preferred presidential candidates and heterogeneity are consistent with an interpretation of this behavior as taste based

wage discrimination in the nba evidence using free agent signings this article takes a step toward understanding potential causes of wage discrimination in an economy highly dependent on the service industry traditionally categorized within the service industry professional sport leagues such as the national basketball association nba provides a unique setting to examine the potential impact of race on salary we analyze free agency contract signings which allow us to better capture the determinants of players wages from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the prominence of wage discrimination in the nba using weighted linear regression models and the oaxaca blinder decomposition we find that black athletes are paid significantly less than their counterparts in addition we also identify the presence of consumer discrimination after controlling the exposure of a player to the audience which is observed through the interaction term between the share of msa population which is white and an identifier for whether a player is black

incentives performance and choking in darts this paper examines how within match variation in incentives affects the performance of darts players the game of darts offers an attractive naturally occurring research setting because performance can be observed at the individual level and without obscuring effects of risk considerations and behavior of others we analyze four data sets covering a total of 29 381 darts matches of professional amateur and youth players we find that amateur and youth players display a sizable performance decrease at decisive moments professional players appear less susceptible of such choking under pressure our results speak to a growing literature on the limits of increasing incentives as a recipe for better performance

racial discrimination among nba referees the nba provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high pressure setting with referees making split second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become evident we find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite race officiating crew than when they are officiated by an own race refereeing crew these biases are sufficiently large so that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games our results do not distinguish whether the bias stems from the actions of white or black referees

the booker decision and discrimination in federal criminal sentences i introduction the sentencing reform act passed by congress in 1984 established the federal sentencing guidelines the guidelines were designed to improve standardization in punishments handed out to convicted criminals by limiting what had been federal judges nearly unfettered discretion in sentencing anderson kling and stith 1999 stith and cabranes 1998 for federal crimes committed after november 1 1987 the act established that sentences of incarceration were to be determined by a table mapping the severity of the offense a level between 1 and 43 and the defendant s criminal history a level between i and vi to a potential range of months imprisonment table 1 shows the united states sentencing commission s ussc sentencing table a defendant for example with a final offense level of 20 and a criminal history category of ih should according to the guidelines be sentenced to somewhere between 41 and 51 months in federal prison the actual sentence would be an integer within that range 1 the act also abolished parole for federal crimes though up to 15 of an inmate s sentence could be reduced for good behavior 2 the sentencing reform act declared that table 1 s guideline ranges were mandatory federal judges had to incur a nontrivial cost to sentence a defendant outside them but on january 12 2005 the united states supreme court ruled in the two part decision u s vs booker that a the sentencing guidelines violated a defendant s constitutional fight to a jury trial 3 and b in order to maintain constitutionality the guidelines were to be effectively advisory instead of mandatory 4 legal observers had expected the overturning of the federal sentencing guidelines system since june 2004 when the supreme court decision blakely v washington invalidated washington state s sentencing guidelines system because it violated a defendant s right to a jury trial denniston 2004 by making the sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory booker reduced the cost of sentencing outside the guidelines and increased the ambiguity of federal judges sentencing decisions according to bertrand chugh and mullainathan 2005 ambiguity is one of three situations in which implicit discrimination is likely to occur the other two situations are inattentiveness to task and time pressure implicit discrimination unlike taste based discrimination becker 1957 or statistical discrimination aigner and cain 1977 reflects implicit attitudes that bertrand chugh and mullainathan 2005 state are unintentional and outside of the discriminator s awareness research indicating implicit discrimination include findings that national basketball association referees call fewer fouls against players of their own race price and wolfers 2010 that major league baseball umpires are more likely to call strikes when the pitcher is of their own race parsons et al 2007 and that screeners of resumes are more likely to ignore job applications with black names than ones with white names bertrand and mullainathan 2004 each of these scenarios describes a situation where ambiguity inattentiveness or time pressure is a factor and where a statistically significant amount of discriminatory treatment is detected 5 this paper tests whether the booker decision by increasing the ambiguity of federal judges sentencing decisions increased manifestations of discrimination in accordance with the hypothesis of bertrand chugh and mullainathan 2005 difference in difference results show that conditional on a defendant s table 1 guideline cell booker reduced sentences significantly for the default group of defendants white male u s citizens who never earned a high school diploma female defendants and defendants with terminal high school degrees received significantly larger booker related sentence reductions and college graduates received significantly smaller ones

interracial workplace cooperation evidence from the nba using data from the national basketball association nba we examine whether patterns of workplace cooperation occur disproportionately among workers of the same race we find that holding constant the composition of teammates on the floor basketball players are no more likely to complete an assist to a player of the same race than a player of a different race our confidence interval allows us to reject even small amounts of same race bias in passing patterns we find some evidence of own race bias in situations where the outcome of a particular play is less important our findings suggest that high levels of interracial cooperation can occur in a setting where workers are operating in a highly visible setting with strong incentives to behave efficiently jel j15 j71 l23

a nearly optimal auction for an uninformed seller abstract this paper describes a nearly optimal auction mechanism that does not require previous knowledge of the distribution of values of potential buyers the mechanism we propose builds on the new literature on the elicitation of information from experts we extend the latter to the case where the secret information shared by the experts potential buyers in our model can be used against them if it becomes public knowledge

the effects of information and competition on racial discrimination evidence from a field experiment abstract we study racial discrimination by simultaneously selling identical products on ebay in pairs of auctions posted under different racially identifying names we detect significant price differences which are indicative of in group biases white names receive higher prices for distinctively white products and black names receive higher prices for distinctively black products but price differences only emerge for sellers who have low ebay feedback scores in less competitive markets because the price differences dissipate as sellers accumulate credible reputations the patterns in the data are indicative of statistical discrimination overall the results suggest that mechanisms designed to reduce informational asymmetries and increased competition are both effective at reducing discrimination in online auctions

cultural proximity and loan outcomes we present evidence that shared codes religious beliefs ethnicity cultural proximity between lenders and borrowers improves the efficiency of credit allocation we identify in group preferential treatment using dyadic data on the religion and caste of bank officers and borrowers from a bank in india and a rotation policy that induces exogenous matching between officers and borrowers cultural proximity increases lending on both intensive and extensive margins and improves repayment performance even after the in group officer is replaced by an out group one further cultural proximity increases loan dispersion and reduces loan to collateral ratios our results imply that cultural proximity mitigates informational problems that adversely affect lending which in turn relaxes financial constraints and improves access to finance

women and power unpopular unwilling or held back we use spain s equality law to test for the existence of agency problems between party leaders and their constituents the law mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists in towns with populations above 5 000 using pre and postquota data by party and municipality we implement a triple difference design we find that female quotas resulted in slightly better electoral results for the parties that were most affected by the quota our evidence shows that party leaders were not maximizing electoral results prior to the quota suggesting the existence of agency problems that hinder female representation in political institutions

gender discrimination in job ads evidence from china we study explicit gender discrimination in a population of ads on a chinese internet job board gender targeted job ads are common favor women as often as men and are much less common in jobs requiring higher levels of skill employers relative preferences for female versus male workers on the other hand are more strongly related to the preferred age height and beauty of the worker than to job skill levels almost two thirds of the variation in advertised gender preferences occurs within firms and one third occurs within firmoccupation cells overall these patterns are not well explained by a firm level animus model by a glass ceiling model or by models in which broad occupational categories are consistently gendered across firms instead the patterns suggest a model in which firms have idiosyncratic preferences for particular job gender matches which are overridden in skilled positions by factors such as thinner labor markets or a greater incentive to search broadly for the most qualified candidate jel codes j16 j63 j71 copyright 2013 oxford university press

the harder the task the higher the score findings of a difficulty bias studies have found that going first or last in a sequential order contest leads to a biased outcome commonly called order bias or primacy and recency studies have also found that judges have a tendency to reward contestants they recognize with additional points called reference bias controlling for known biases we test for a new type of bias we refer to as difficulty bias which reveals that athletes attempting more difficult routines receive higher execution scores even when difficulty and execution are judged separately despite some identification challenges we add to the literature by finding strong evidence of a difficulty bias in gymnastics we also provide generalizations beyond athletics jel l10 l83 d81 j70 z1

endophilia or exophobia beyond discrimination the discrimination literature treats outcomes as relative but does a differential arise because agents discriminate against others exophobia or because they favour their own kind endophilia using a field experiment that assigned graders randomly to students examinations that did did not contain names we find favouritism but no discrimination by nationality nor by gender we are able to identify these preferences under a wide range of behavioural scenarios regarding the graders that endophilia dominates exophobia alters how we should measure discriminatory wage differentials and should inform the formulation of anti discrimination policy

productivity spillovers in team production evidence from professional basketball we estimate a model where workers are heterogeneous both in their own productivity and in their ability to facilitate the productivity of others we use data from professional basketball to measure the importance of peers in productivity because we have clear measures of output and members of a worker s group change on a regular basis our empirical results highlight that productivity spillovers play an important role in team production despite this we find that worker compensation is largely determined by own productivity with little weight given to productivity spillovers

sex and credit do gender interactions matter for credit market outcomes abstract this paper studies the effects of gender interactions on the supply of and demand for credit using data from a large albanian lender we document that first time borrowers assigned to officers of the opposite sex are less likely to return for a second loan the effect is larger when officers have little prior exposure to borrowers of the other gender and when they have more discretion to act on their gender beliefs as proxied by financial market competition and branch size we also find that first time borrowers matched with opposite sex officers pay higher interest rates and receive smaller and shorter maturity loans but do not experience higher arrears our results are consistent with the existence of a gender bias and learning effects that lead to the disappearance of the bias

can losing lead to winning individuals groups and teams who are behind their opponents in competition tend to be more likely to lose in contrast we show that through increasing motivation being slightly behind can actually increase success analysis of more than 18 000 professional basketball games illustrates that being slightly behind at halftime leads to a discontinuous increase in winning percentage teams behind by a point at halftime for example actually win more often than teams ahead by one or approximately six percentage points more often than expected this psychological effect is roughly half the size of the proverbial home team advantage analysis of more than 45 000 collegiate basketball games finds consistent though smaller results experiments corroborate the field data and generalize their findings providing direct causal evidence that being slightly behind increases effort and casting doubt on alternative explanations for the results taken together these findings illustrate that losing can sometimes lead to winning this paper was accepted by peter wakker decision analysis