Lauréat du Prix Edmond Malinvaud 2018

The laureate of the 2018 AFSE Prize in honour of Edmond Malinvaud is Dylan Glover (Sciences Po Paris). His paper entitled “Discrimination as a self-fulfilling prophecy: evidence from French grocery stores” was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2017, and co-authored by two other young talented economists, William Parienté (Economics School of Louvain) and Amanda Pallais (Harvard University).

Dylan and his co-authors investigate how being exposed to discriminating managers affects the performance of grocery cashiers in France. One (among numerous others) exciting trait of their paper is how they identify biased or unbiased managers, relying on psychological and social sciences by implementing an implicit association test.

 They find that, when cashiers from minority groups are scheduled to work with managers who are biased, they work less efficiently: They are absent more often, spend less time at work, etc. The finding is consistent with statistical discrimination in hiring: Because minorities underperform when assigned to biased managers, the firm sets a higher hiring standard for minorities to get similar average performance from minority and nonminority workers. In this respect, the paper delivers highly valuable findings to assess the relative empirical relevance of alternative theories of discrimination, therefore bridging the gap between empirics and theory.

 Beyond the area of labor market discrimination, the paper opens interesting routes to better understand how selection might work in various areas such as credit rationing, housing allocation, etc. In this respect, the jury was deeply convinced that the paper will be strongly influential in various fields in economics.