Reports of the death of Title VII’s disparate impact theory of discrimination in the wake of Ricci v. DeStefanomay be exaggerated. Widely praised and widely criticized in the newspapers and the blogosphere, Ricci is the latest, but not the last, chapter in a long-running feud between Congress and the Supreme Court regarding… Read More »
In this Editorial, we present a basic, one-period microeconomic model in which equilibrium occurs in both perfectly competitive labor markets and goods markets. This piece is a companion to our earlier Legal Workshop Editorial, Passive Discrimination, which was posted on June 22, 2009. Because all hypothesized workers are equally productive,… Read More »
In their recent article, Passive Discrimination, Jonah Gelbach, Jonathan Klick, and Lesley Wexler (hereafter “GKW”) offer yet another way to pile additional liabilities on hapless employers for race or sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their article is ingenious because it identifies a mechanism—previously discussed… Read More »
In this Editorial, we present a distinct mechanism of employer discrimination largely ignored by scholars and regulators alike. What we term “passive discrimination” involves an employer’s use of wage and benefits packages that exploit observed, systematic group-level preference heterogeneity in order to induce worker sorting such that members of a… Read More »
Zachary A. Kramer
- Dickinson School of Law (Penn. State)
Dawn Dawson was an outsider among outsiders. A self-described gender-nonconforming lesbian woman, Dawson worked as a hair assistant and stylist trainee at Bumble & Bumble, a high-end salon in New York City. Her coworkers at the salon were an eclectic mix of outsiders, and the salon management encouraged its employees to… Read More »