TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bodenhorn,Howard
AU  - Ruebeck,Christopher S.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Economics of Identity and the Endogeneity of Race
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2003///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - September 2003; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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 is 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w9962
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w9962
ER  -