Taste-Based Discrimination at the NYSE - Empirical Evidence from a Shock to Preferences after WWI

60 Pages Posted: 17 Sep 2006 Last revised: 24 Aug 2010

See all articles by Petra Moser

Petra Moser

NYU Stern Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Date Written: August 20, 2010

Abstract

This paper identifies taste-based discrimination through a two-part empirical test. First, it constructs quantitative measures of revealed preferences, which establish that World War I created a persistent change in ethnic preferences that switched the status of German Americans from a mainstream ethnicity to an ethnic minority until the late 1920s. Second, the paper uses this shock to preferences to identify the effects of taste-based discrimination at the example of traders at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). A new data set of more than 5,000 applications for membership in the NYSE reveals that changes in ethnic preferences after the war more than doubled the probability that applicants with German-sounding names would be rejected.

Keywords: Ethnic Discrimination, Taste-Based Discrimination, NYSE, Economic History, World War I

JEL Classification: J71, J78, N22

Suggested Citation

Moser, Petra, Taste-Based Discrimination at the NYSE - Empirical Evidence from a Shock to Preferences after WWI (August 20, 2010). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=930237 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.930237

Petra Moser (Contact Author)

NYU Stern Department of Economics ( email )

44 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
332
Abstract Views
2,957
Rank
141,204
PlumX Metrics