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Examples:

• blind auditioning
• waiters and waitresses
• Emily and Latoya

Definitions and measurement:

• wage discrimination and occupational discrimination
• premarket discrimination and labor market discrimination
• index of occupational dissimilarity
• controlling for observable characteristics

Theories:

• employer prejudice
• customer prejudice
• co-worker prejudice
• statistical discrimination

Americans with Disabilities Act:

• By allowing disabled individuals to sue if they are discriminated in the hiring process, the Act serves as a de facto employment subsidy and will tend to increase the employment of the disabled.
• By requiring employers to provide "reasonable accomodation" to workers with disabilities, the Act increases the cost of hiring disabled workers and will tend to reduce their employment.
• The ADA also increases the cost of firing disabled workers because it makes it easier for these workers to sue. While increasing firing cost seems to be beneficial to these workers, one has to worry about long run consequences. Employers who anticipate higher firing costs are less likely to hire these workers because no one can guarantee that an initially good match will stay good forever. Also note that workers who are fired are a lot more likely to sue than workers who don't get hired.
• The equal pay provision of the ADA may have increased the wages of the disabled, creating involuntary unemployment off the disabled labor supply curve. The equal pay provision also interacts with firing costs and the costs of accomodation by preventing wages from falling to offset these costs, exacerbating the decline in employment of the disabled.
• The accomodation costs and litigation costs could amount to at least US$35 per disabled worker per week, representing roughly a 6-10 percent increase in labor cost.
• Acemoglu and Angrist find a substantial and statistically significant decline in weeks worked by disabled people after the ADA became effective in 1992. The following table shows the difference in weeks worked between those who were disabled and those who were not:

                          men (21-39)   men (40-58)   women (21-39)
  _________________________________________________________________
  disability main effect  -23.8         -29.7         -14.0
  disability x 1991        -0.71          0.64          0.51
  disability x 1992         0.38          1.07         -2.37  
  disability x 1993        -1.63         -1.82         -3.93
  disability x 1994        -1.82         -1.27         -4.57
  disability x 1995        -3.11         -1.53         -3.50
  disability x 1996        -2.87         -0.45         -3.98
  

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Lecture Notes