J. Atsu Amegashie (University of Guelph – Department of Economics) has posted A Positive Theory of Immutable Characteristics and Discrimination on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
History is replete with overt discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, income, caste, citizenship, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, marital status, academic performance, health status, volume of market transactions, religion, sexual orientation, criminal record, disability, seniority, etc. However, these forms of discrimination are not equally tolerable. For example, discrimination based on immutable or prohibitively unalterable characteristics such as race, gender, or ethnicity is much less acceptable. In the post-civil rights jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, race is a suspect classification and gender is a quasi-suspect classification. In this paper, I develop a simple rent-seeking model in which conflict is driven by either discrimination that is based on an immutable characteristic like race, gender, or ethnicity or by discrimination that is based on non-permanent characteristics like age or immigration status. I find that conflict driven by discrimination that is based on immutable (permanent) traits is salient relative to conflict driven by discrimination that is based on non-permanent characteristics. My results are not driven by a stronger intrinsic aversion to discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics. I am able to explain why some forms of discrimination (e.g., racism) are much less tolerable than other forms of discrimination (e.g., age discrimination) without making any value judgement about either form of discrimination.