Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity produced in recognition of the costliness of adopting and maintaining a specific identity. These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity are potentially endogenous because racial and ethnic identities are fluid. We look at the free African-American population in the mid-nineteenth century to investigate the costs and benefits of adopting alternative racial identities. We model the choice as an extensive-form game, where whites choose to accept or reject a separate mulatto identity and mixed race individuals then choose whether or not to adopt that mulatto identity. Adopting a mulatto identity generates pecuniary gains, but imposes psychic costs. Our empirical results imply that race is contextual and that there was a large pecuniary benefit to adopting a mixed-race identity.

Colourism, African Americans, Wealth decomposition, J7, N3,

We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labour market and, in particular, to earnings. We find a significant wage effect for left-handed men with high levels of education. This positive wage effect is strongest among those who have lower than average earnings relative to those of similar high education. This effect is not found among women.

What characteristics of a product’s local market make its withdrawal more likely? This study investigates the importance of intrafirm “cannibalization” of a product’s demand by products manufactured by the same firm versus interfirm competition from others’ products. While both forces impact product withdrawal, cannibalization has a more robust and significant effect. Hedonic price regressions also reveal higher discounting of older models’ quality-adjusted prices, strengthening the argument for caution when treating list prices as proxies for transaction prices. Copyright Springer 2004differentiated products, exit, hedonic price index, transaction prices, variable hazard rate, withdrawal,

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