Calendrier du 13 mars 2018
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 13/03/2018 de 17:00 à 18:00
Campus Jourdan - R1-13
SEGù Mariona ()
Do short-term rent platforms affect rents? Evidence from Airbnb in Barcelona
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 13/03/2018 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
PERSAUD Alexander (University of North Carolina Asheville)
A (Paid) Passage to India:Migration and revealed willingness to pay for upper-caste status
How much are upper-caste individuals willing to pay for upper-caste status? Traditional dis-crimination models view discrimination from the vantage point of a group that receives worsetreatment due to its non-economic characteristics vis-a-vis a reference group. Discriminatedgroups pay a cost in the labor market for these characteristics. However, the corollary may betrue: a privileged group may pay a fee in order to receive better, rather than equal, treatment.In the case of caste, I hypothesize that high-caste Indians abroad are willing to pay more toreturn to India and reap the labor and non-labor benefits of high-caste status. I utilize uniquedata on indentured Indians in Fiji in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. This contextremoves confounding labor-market factors and cleanly identifies the gross value of upper castes.I show that the lower bound of the value of the highest castes in north India roughly 2.5 years’gross wages. Robustness using hypothesized inter-caste hierarchies lead to the same orderingand diminishing effects as caste status falls. The effects are entirely driven by men, as women’scaste status appears delinked from return migration. My results show some of the first evidencequantifying a caste’s value and speak to caste’s persistence today.