Weekly Seminar: Utteeyo Dasgupta, “Games of Prejudice – Experiments at the Extensive and Intensive Margin”

We design a novel labor market experiment to elicit preferences for discrimination among Slovak employers at the extensive margin (worker selection) and at the intensive margin (wage offer) towards Roma employees (the largest minority in Europe). Our lab-in-the field experiment also allows us separate taste-based discrimination from statistical discrimination and examine the impacts of raising the costs of discrimination. We find discrimination to be prevalent at both margins, but more prominent at the extensive margin. Additionally, we find higher incidence of taste-based discrimination compared to statistical discrimination. Our results indicate that Slovak employers practice discrimination even in the presence of modest economic costs, and such behavior goes down when the cost of taste-based discrimination is made prohibitively high.

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