Tracing the Economic Impact of Cumulative Discrimination

摘要

An extensive literature in the social sciences seeks to identify the presence and extent of discrimination and its effect on social or economic outcomes. This literature typically focuses on investigating whether there are race-specific effects present for a particular outcome (years of school, hiring, loan applications) within a particular domain (education, labor markets, housing markets) at a particular point in time. In this paper, I discuss the need to model and measure the cumulative effects of discrimination. For simplicity, I talk about black/white racial differences, but the discussion can be applied to other group comparisons. The paper builds on the discussion of cumulative discrimination found in Blank et al. (2004). Cumulative discrimination is the measurement of discriminatory effects over time and across domains. Rather than focusing on the impact of discrimination on a particular outcome (discrimination in wages, discrimination in medical treatment for heart disease, etc.), the study of cumulative discrimination looks at the cumulative effects of single or multiple incidents of discrimination across time and across social settings. The emphasis is on dynamic and systematic processes. Some of these processes may perpetuate or reinforce discriminatory effects. Other processes may mitigate or offset the effects of discrimination over time.