Location: 368A Heady Hall

Description: Sher Afghan Asad
"Do workers discriminate against their outgroup employers? Evidence from an online labor market"
Abstract: Discrimination in labor markets is often thought of as being one-sided, driven mostly by employers toward their out-group employees. This paper restricts attention to racial identity and studies possible discrimination in the “reverse” direction, i.e., we ask, do workers discriminate (say, by under providing effort) for an out-race employer relative to an otherwise-identical, own-race one? We postulate that the main outlet for such discrimination is via social preferences (altruism and reciprocity).  We run a large scale model-based experiment on  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (M-Turk) to answer our question. Interestingly, the results show that white workers have significantly higher pro-social preferences towards black employers as compared to white employers. 

Contact Person: Otavio Bartalotti