City Nondifferences Revisited

Social Interaction and the Minority-Majority Earnings Inequality: Why Being a Minority Hurts But Being a Big Minority Hurts More

“…Another strand of literature, represented by Glenn (1964), Spilerman and Miller (1977), and Semyonov et al (1984), advocates that, given the discrimination-based asymmetry of job status distribution between minority and majority, an increase in the population of subordinate minority workers increases the supply of low-skill labor predominantly supplied by the minority, thereby crowding out majority workers from the low status jobs into more lucrative ones and, as a result, widening the socio-economic gap. That discrimination keeping minority workers subordinate in low status jobs is increasingly worthwhile to employers as the relative size of minority population in a given market increases was advocated by Thurow (1969).…”

Ethnic Specialization and Earnings Inequality: Why Being a Minority Hurts But Being a Big Minority Hurts More

“…5 Williams (1947), Allport (1954), Blalock (1967, Reich (1971), and Bonacich (1972Bonacich ( , 1976 argue that the hostility of a superordinate majority against minority people is increasing in the relative size of the minority. Another strand of literature, represented by Glenn (1964), Spilerman and Miller (1977), and Semyonov et al (1984), advocates that discriminatory occupational structure creates an environment in which influx of minority workers crowds out majority workers into better jobs with higher pay. In an approach that understands discrimination as a consequence of a specific form of asymmetric information in the labor market, statistical discrimination, Lundberg and Startz (2002) and Coate and Loury (1993), building on the groundbreaking ideas of Phelps (1972), Arrow (1972aArrow ( , 1972bArrow ( , 1973, and Aigner and Cain (1977), argue that a priori actual or perceived asymmetries are maintained in the equilibrium through self-fulfilling expectations.…”