GIVEN the long history of making racial slurs about the efforts of some workers, any study casting black and Hispanic men as lazier than whites and Asians is sure to court controversy. A provocative new working paper by economists Daniel Hamermesh, Katie Genadek and Michael Burda sticks a tentative toe into these murky waters. They suggest that America's well-documented racial wage gap is overstated by 10% because minorities, especially men, spend larger portions of their workdays not actually working. After rejecting a number of plausible explanations for why this might be, the authors finally attribute the discrepancy to unexplained "cultural differences".
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