Measuring Employer-Based Discrimination Versus Customer-Based Discrimination

A BSTRACT . This paper examines alternative hypotheses as to why French Canadians are underrepresented on National Hockey League teams based in English Canada relative to their representation on teams based in the United States.
Using panel data, the paper accounts for the idiosyncratic behavior of specific teams by using a fixed-effects model. With these fixed-effects accounted for, the paper tests the degree to which the representation of French Canadians on a team is related to that team's location—either in English Canada or the United States—versus the degree to which the representation is related to the ethnic origin of that team's coach and general manager.
It finds the ethnic origin variables to be unable to explain the representational patterns, leaving the team location variable as the only significant explanatory variable. These statistical findings thus support a "customer discrimination" explanation of the underrepresentation, as opposed to an "employer discrimination" explanation. Identifying this source of any potential discrimination is important, since different sources will have different implications for the prospects of reducing such discrimination.     

DO OLDER WORKERS DROP OUT OF THE LABOUR MARKET? SOME RECENT BRITISH EVIDENCE

This paper demonstrates the significance of age and duration effects in the relationship between earnings and unemployment using two-step GMM estimation and UK county level data for 1984–1993.     

Some tests for the constancy of regressions under heteroscedasticity

For testing the equality of coefficients of a linear regression model under heteroscedasticity, we suggest an F criterion conditioned on the posterior mean of the ratio of standard deviations of error terms in two subsamples. For pairable subsamples, and exact F test is derived. Sampling experiments show that the Chow test differs substantially from the nominal significance level when the two subsample sizes are unequal, and that the F test conditioned on the posterior mean is superior to other tests when sample sizes are small.     

Labour force and land distributional effects of agricultural technology: A case study of coffee

Land reform frequently refers to government policies which expropriate large farms and fragment them into smaller units; however, land reform can also refer to the opposite process, that of consolidation of farms which are too small for efficient production. In the latter sense, that of land consolidation, land reform may or may not be socially desirable and prompt government intervention. Possible gains in efficiency accruing from land consolidation may not be desirable if it entails agricultural unemployment and accelerated rural-urban migration, in which case governments may try to intervene. This paper looks at land reform in the context of one crop, coffee. New techniques of coffee cultivation will increase output-labour, output-land and labour-land ratios, offering the prospect for higher coffee employment and output. However, economic and institutional barries will preclude higher output; as a result coffee employment and small coffee farms will be threatened. This paper examines the economic implications of the new coffee technology in the context of Columbia.     

Preferential trade agreements and the structure of international trade

In this paper we examine the impact of membership in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on trade between PTA members. Rather than considering the impact of PTA membership on the volume of trade we consider the impact of membership on the structure of trade. For a large sample of countries over the period 1962–2000 we find that membership in a PTA is associated with an increase in the extent of intra-industry trade. Our results indicate that this is especially the case for PTAs formed between richer countries, with the effects of PTAs between poorer countries found to be smaller.     

The accumulation of property by southern blacks and whites: Individual-level evidence from a South Carolina cotton county, 1910-1919

This paper examines new data on wealth and wealth accumulation by blacks and whites in Calhoun County, South Carolina between 1910 and 1919. Despite focusing on a single county, the data utilized in this paper make it possible to explore property accumulation by southern blacks and whites in new ways. Unlike previous studies, this one provides information on both real quantities and dollar assessments. This breakdown reveals that the rapid accumulation of property by blacks was entirely real and not due in part to an increasingly discriminatory assessment policy. By merging the assessment data with individual-level census records, it is possible to examine how wealth and wealth accumulation were influenced by race, gender, age, occupation, and literacy. In particular, the effect of literacy on the wealth of black men in 1910 was found to be economically strong in high wealth quantiles but weak in low wealth quantiles. By 1919, the impact of literacy on the wealth of black men had become economically important across the board. Furthermore, literacy had a significant influence on the relative size of wealth accumulations but offered little protection against low accumulations.