In the US, black workers spend more time in unemployment, lose their jobs more rapidly, and earn lower wages than white workers. This paper quantifies the contributions of statistical discrimination, as portrayed by negative stereotyping and screening discrimination, to such employment and wage disparities. We develop an equilibrium search model of statistical discrimination with learning based on Moscarini (2005) and estimate it by indirect inference. We show that statistical discrimination alone cannot simultaneously explain the observed differences in residual wages and monthly job loss probabilities between black and white workers. However, a model with negative stereotyping, larger unemployment valuation and faster learning about the quality of matches for black workers can account for these facts. One implication of our findings is that black workers have larger returns to tenure. JEL Codes: J31, J64, J71.

This paper describes a novel concept of customer discrimination in the housing market, neighbor discrimination. We develop a matching model with ethnic externalities in which landlords differ in the number of apartments they own within the same building. Larger landlords are more likely to discriminate only if some tenants are prejudiced against the minority group. Observing that minority tenants are less likely than majority group tenants to live in a building with a single large landlord is thus evidence of neighbor discrimination. We show empirically that African immigrants in France are significantly less likely to live in a building owned by a single landlord. This increases the probability that African immigrants live in public housing in localities with more single-landlord private apartment blocks.

Searching for partners involves informational persistence that reduces future traders’ matching probability. In this article, traders who are no longer available but who left tracks on the market are called phantoms. We examine a dynamic matching market in which phantoms are a by-product of search activity, no coordination frictions are assumed, and non-phantom traders may lose time trying to match with phantoms. The resulting aggregate matching technology features increasing returns to scale in the short run, but has constant returns to scale in the long run. We embed a generalized version of this matching function in the canonical continuous-time equilibrium search unemployment model. Long-run constant returns to scale imply there is a unique steady state, whereas short-run increasing returns generate excess volatility in the short run and endogenous fluctuations based on self-fulfilling prophecies.

We address the effects of FDI on the labor share in developing countries. Our theory relies on the impacts of FDI on wage and labor productivity in a frictional labor market. FDI has two opposite effects on the labor share: a negative force originated by technological advance, and a positive force due to increased labor market competition between .rms. We test this theory on aggregate panel data through fixed effects and IV estimates. We examine the relationship between the labor share in the manufacturing sector and the ratio of FDI stock to GDP. We show that FDI has decreased the labor share in the host countries of our dataset. This impact amounts to between 10% to 20% of the mean labor share in our sample.