In most countries, women are absent from work more frequently than men. Using personnel data, we find that the absences of women below the age of 45 follow a 28-day cycle, while the absences of men and of women over the age of 45 do not.... more
In most countries, women are absent from work more frequently than men. Using personnel data, we find that the absences of women below the age of 45 follow a 28-day cycle, while the absences of men and of women over the age of 45 do not. We interpret this as evidence that the menstrual cycle increases female absenteeism. To investigate
Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be... more
Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be tackled by state action. Feminists have criticized political liberalism for its alleged inability to embrace a full feminist agenda, inability explained by political liberals' commitment to the ideal of state neutrality. The debate continues on whether neutral states can accommodate two feminist demands: to enact policies aimed at dismantling the feminization of caregiving, especially childrearing, and to compensate women for some of the disadvantages they incur by being primary care-givers. I contribute to this debate with three arguments in support of policies meant to de-gender care-giving and compensate care-givers. The first appeals to equality of opportunity to positions of advantage and justifies policies that prevent or mitigate statistical discrimination and implicit biases. The second draws attention to a possible causal relationship between the specialization of women in early childcare and misogyny; since the latter is incompatible with political liberal justice, it yields the conclusion that political liberals ought to further investigate the causal hypothesis with the aim of establishing or refuting it. The third argument concludes that legitimate childrearing prohibits adults from socializing children or, at least girls, into gender norms; it justifies duties of justice on the side of parents, educators, and economic agents, and state policies meant to offset foreseeable breaches of some of these duties.
A statistical approach to defect detection and disc rimination has been applied to the case of hot roll ed steel. The probability distribution of pixel intensities has been estimated from a small set of images without de fects, and this... more
A statistical approach to defect detection and disc rimination has been applied to the case of hot roll ed steel. The probability distribution of pixel intensities has been estimated from a small set of images without de fects, and this distribution is used to select pixels with unlikely values as candidates for defects. Discriminat ion of true defects from random noise pixels is achieved by a d ynamical thresholding procedure, which tracks the b ehaviour of clusters of selected pixels for varying threshol d level. Boundary levels of the dynamic threshold range are determined from the estimated probability distribut ion of the pixel intensities.
Using pure statistical evidence about a group to judge a particular member of that group is often found objectionable. One natural explanation of why this is objectionable appeals to the moral notion of respecting individuality: to... more
Using pure statistical evidence about a group to judge a particular member of that group is often found objectionable. One natural explanation of why this is objectionable appeals to the moral notion of respecting individuality: to properly respect individuality, we need individualized evidence, not pure statistical evidence. However, this explanation has been criticized on the ground that there is no fundamental difference between the so-called "individualized evidence" and "pure statistical evidence". This paper defends the respecting-individuality explanation by developing an account of what it means to respect individuality. It combines an idealistic account of respecting individuality and a prioritization account of respecting individuality, and offers a principled way to distinguish individualized evidence from non-individualized evidence. Austin, a forty-year-old white businessman, is waiting for taxi outside of a high-end shopping mall in Shanghai. A flower peddler approaches him and asks: "Sir, would you like to buy a flower for this beautiful lady?" pointing to a young Chinese woman standing next to him, whom Austin does not know. The peddler takes them to be a couple. Out of curiosity, Austin asks the peddler why he came to this belief. Imagine three different scenarios: Peddler 1: The peddler responds that he believes that most middle-aged white men are attracted to young Chinese women. Peddler 2: The peddler responds that his company has actually conducted systematic research in the past ten years, according to which a middle-aged white man and a young Chinese woman appearing next to each other in this shopping district have a high chance to be in a relationship.
This paper considers the role of statistical discrimination as a potential explanation for racial and ethnic disparities in health care. The underlying problem is that a physician may have a harder time understanding a symptom report from... more
This paper considers the role of statistical discrimination as a potential explanation for racial and ethnic disparities in health care. The underlying problem is that a physician may have a harder time understanding a symptom report from minority patients. If so, even if there are ...
Tests of statistical discrimination require evaluation records provided by employers or variables that employers do not observe directly but are observed by researchers. As such variables are difficult to obtain, this paper develops a... more
Tests of statistical discrimination require evaluation records provided by employers or variables that employers do not observe directly but are observed by researchers. As such variables are difficult to obtain, this paper develops a strategy that uses variables available in usual data sets. This paper derives testable implications for statistical discrimination by exploiting the heterogeneity in employer learning processes. Evidence from analysis using the March Current Population Survey for 1971-2016 is consistent with the theoretical predictions. The empirical findings are not explained by alternative hypotheses, such as human capital theory, taste-based discrimination, or search and matching models.
In this work, we test the hypothesis that the Colombian system of socio-economic stratification, which ranks dwellings from one to six to calculate utility (public services) rates, may be discriminatory and increase segregation. A field... more
In this work, we test the hypothesis that the Colombian system of socio-economic stratification, which ranks dwellings from one to six to calculate utility (public services) rates, may be discriminatory and increase segregation. A field experiment with around 1000 participants from Bogota is carried out. The design includes a combination of a trust game and a dictator game. Results exclude the presence of pure preferences for discrimination, yet confirm that low strata are associated with stereotypes of low trustworthiness. We also observe significant pro-social behaviour in the low income population, and, most strikingly, we do not observe any difference in trustworthiness according to income level.
We map the recently proposed notions of algorithmic fairness to economic models of Equality of opportunity (EOP)---an extensively studied ideal of fairness in political philosophy. We formally show that through our conceptual mapping,... more
We map the recently proposed notions of algorithmic fairness to economic models of Equality of opportunity (EOP)---an extensively studied ideal of fairness in political philosophy. We formally show that through our conceptual mapping, many existing definition of algorithmic fairness, such as predictive value parity and equality of odds, can be interpreted as special cases of EOP. In this respect, our work serves as a unifying moral framework for understanding existing notions of algorithmic fairness. Most importantly, this framework allows us to explicitly spell out the moral assumptions underlying each notion of fairness, and interpret recent fairness impossibility results in a new light. Last but not least and inspired by luck egalitarian models of EOP, we propose a new family of measures for algorithmic fairness. We illustrate our proposal empirically and show that employing a measure of algorithmic (un)fairness when its underlying moral assumptions are not satisfied, can have devastating consequences for the disadvantaged group's welfare.
Philosophical reflection on racial profiling takes one of two forms. The first sees it as an example of “statistical discrimination,” raising the question of when, if ever, probabilistic generalizations about group behavior or... more
Philosophical reflection on racial profiling takes one of two forms. The first sees it as an example of “statistical discrimination,” raising the question of when, if ever, probabilistic generalizations about group behavior or characteristics can be used to judge particular individuals. The second is concerned with how racial profiling illuminates the reproduction of hierarchies of power and privilege based on skin color and morphology. Insights from both approaches can be synthesized to clarify what, if anything, is wrong with racial profiling and what broader conclusions for equality and security follow from the study of profiling.
Summary: Boundary-based corner detection has been widely applied in spline curve fitting, automated optical inspection, image segmentation, object recognition, etc. In order to obtain good results, users usually need to adjust the length... more
Summary: Boundary-based corner detection has been widely applied in spline curve fitting, automated optical inspection, image segmentation, object recognition, etc. In order to obtain good results, users usually need to adjust the length of region of support to resist zigzags due ...
We study racial discrimination by simultaneously selling identical products on eBay in pairs of auctions posted under different racially identifying names. We detect significant price differences, which are indicative of in-group biases.... more
We study racial discrimination by simultaneously selling identical products on eBay in pairs of auctions posted under different racially identifying names. We detect significant price differences, which are indicative of in-group biases. White names receive higher prices for distinctively white products, and black names receive higher prices for distinctively black products. But price differences only emerge for sellers who have low eBay feedback scores in less competitive markets. Because the price differences dissipate as sellers accumulate ...
This paper examines the relative magnitudes of "sheepskin effects" in the returns to education for the three main ethnic groups in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador (MRS), Bahia state, in Northeastern Brazil, and ascertains... more
This paper examines the relative magnitudes of "sheepskin effects" in the returns to education for the three main ethnic groups in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador (MRS), Bahia state, in Northeastern Brazil, and ascertains whether their pattern is consistent with a simple signalling model. We show that failure to account for the strong signal furnished by admission to university, which is subject to a rigorous entrance exam in Bahia state, artificially inflates the estimated rate of return to an additional year of university education and results in downward bias in the estimated sheepskin effect of completing a four-year university degree. This is especially true for blacks. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that sheepskin effects take the traditional form of an additional return to the completion of a diploma for whites, whereas for blacks the additional return stems entirely from the sheepskin-like effect associated with admission to university.
