Discrimination and public policies.

Summary In the three chapters of this thesis, I study the effect of prejudice and discriminatory preferences on the labor market. I am also interested in the effectiveness of public policies that aim to mitigate the negative effects of these preferences. In my first chapter, I use a famous case that changed the monopsony power of firms to see if, as Becker predicted, market failures have an impact on wage discrimination. My results show that when monopsony power decreases, wage discrimination disappears. This result shows that bias does not necessarily have to translate into wage discrimination. In the second chapter, I analyze the effect of another public policy, a 2015 reform that imposed gender quotas on academic selection committees in France. The goal of this reform was to improve women's rankings by increasing the share of women on committees. In evaluating the reform, I find the opposite effect: women are ranked lower by recruitment committees after the reform. However, this result does not show that women have a preference for men. The negative effect of the reform is only found in committees headed by male panel chairs, suggesting that men's behavior may have changed as a result of the reform as well. This chapter demonstrates the need to evaluate public policy, so that well-intentioned reforms do not cause more harm than good. In the third and final chapter, I focus on the location choices of individuals. I am particularly interested in the following question: Do workers prefer to live in a city with a higher proportion of residents of the same ethnic group as themselves, ceteris paribus? I use a spatial equilibrium model to answer this question. Controlling for individuals' wages, rents, transfer incomes, and networks, these preferences are comparable to real wages in individuals' city location choices. I then simulate the model to try to see what impact these preferences have on wage differentials between white and black workers in the United States.