MinE Best Paper Award

The MinE Best Paper Award was inaugurated in 2022.

This Award is given to the best paper presented in the annual EEA congresses whose focus is on the study of LGBTQ+, Race-Ethnicity-Religion and/or Disabilities.

The Award is financed by the Hub for Equal Representation  in STICERD, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the winner is awarded €5,000.

The 2023 Award was presented to:

School Desegregation and Political Preferences: Long-Run Evidence from Kentucky Ethan Kaplan, Jörg L. Spenkuch and Cody Tuttle

Motivation: They provide a well identified study of important effects of segregation, and hence of desegregation policies. Exploiting a randomized busing policy in Kentucky, they find long run effects of exposure to a larger share of black fellow students in high school on ideological preferences, confirming Allport’s contact hypothesis. In particular, whites randomly more exposed to black fellow students are more likely to turn democrat and less likely to donate money to conservative causes when adults. The impact on racial attitudes can also be derived. We have chosen this paper because of the salience in policy debates also in Europe on the consequences of segregation of ethnic groups in cities.

Runner-up papers:

Price and Prejudice Alon Rubinstein
Motivation: The paper offers a fresh perspective on the effects of competition on labour market discrimination, by considering taste-based discrimination by both employers and customers. The author conceptually shows that the overall impacts of product market competition on labor market discrimination are ambiguous due to two offsetting forces: a disciplining effect of sellers in case of employer’s taste discrimination vs. an accommodating effect on buyers. Exploiting the deregulation of the US banking sector, they find that competition in fact increased the black-white wage gap in client intensive occupations, especially in states with high prejudicial preferences.

Ethnic Salience and Discrimination Zahra Murad, Emel Ozturk, Yi Sheng and Sigrid Suetens
Motivation: They ran a number of dictator games where a majority member has to decide allocation of wealth to a minority member – a type of experiment often used to detect taste-based discrimination – and they find that variation in salience of ethnicity (due to exogenous events or randomized information provision) has a social desirability effect that induces more pro-social behavior in the majority. Papers at the juncture of economics, sociology and psychology like this one may be an important avenue of future ideas on education policies.

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