Essays on the determinants of wage inequality.

Authors Publication date
2020
Publication type
Thesis
Summary This thesis examines the determinants of wage inequality from a behavioral economics perspective. The first chapter analyzes students' orientation choices in higher education. Based on the content of motivation letters, we describe the evolution of their academic preferences and how they take into account information about their abilities in different subjects. The second chapter describes the results of an experiment studying income allocation preferences. We show that, behind the veil of ignorance, individuals largely favor greater inequalities when they are also more efficient. But when these inequalities do appear concretely, a quarter of the subjects prefer to reduce the amount allocated to the richest, even if this does not improve anyone's situation. The third chapter investigates how managers' distributional preferences affect the distribution of wages, based on survey data and an experiment. We show that managers have normative distributional preferences and are willing to pay to implement them. The fourth chapter analyzes the results of an online experiment on ethnic discrimination in the United States and Germany. We compare the characteristics of ethnic favoritism within each country. We show that disclosing information about the economic success of ethnic minorities reduces discriminatory behavior by the ethnic majority. However, this information may increase distrust between two people from the same minority.
Topics of the publication
Themes detected by scanR from retrieved publications. For more information, see https://scanr.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr