The Development History Of Labor Appearance Discrimination Theory And The Empirical Test Of China

Whether in the developed or developing countries,labor discrimination has always been an important research topic.Common labor discrimination includes sex discrimination,racial discrimination,household registration discrimination and so on.In addition,the importance of laborers' appearance in the labor market,marriage market and family life has gradually attracted the attention of economists.This article reviews the history of labor discrimination theory,turning our attention to the recent labor market appearance discrimination which has attracted more and more attention.This paper first reviews the ideological basis and early research of the development of the theory of appearance discrimination,and through the interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy and ethics,it traces back to the ideological source of the common labor and personality equality of the workers.But even though scholars in the past have recognized the existence of discrimination in the labor market,the theory of discrimination can not be quantified.With the establishment of Becker's discriminatory economic analysis model,various types of discrimination began to be incorporated into the field of economics.Economists began to try to explain the root causes of such labor market discrimination,seek the underlying mechanism,and derive three classical theories:the market competition theory of market discrimination,the non competition theory of market discrimination,and the theory of statistical discrimination.The competition theory of market discrimination,represented by American Neo liberalist economist Becker,was expanded and supplemented by Krueger,Arrow and Kawrence which proposed discriminatory preferences of employers,employees and consumers.The competition theory of market discrimination has become the classic analytical framework for empirical research on the appearance of domestic labor market since 2010.Since then,the non competitive theory of labor discrimination has developed.On behalf of Fawcett,Bergman,Doringer and Pierre,Mekenna,Black and other scholars,they put forward the congestion hypothesis,the dual labor market discrimination theory,and the theory of the search for the cost discrimination.Finally,based on the information asymmetry in the labor market,Phelps,Aigner and Cain enrich and develop the theory of statistical discrimination.On the basis of the above literature,labor economists began to measure the existence of appearance discrimination and the size of appearance discrimination from the perspective of empirical research.The study of western economics started earlier,while the formal research in China began in the early twenty-first Century(Gao Wenshu,2009),and the related research is not rich,only focus on the single dimension of the labor market.But appearance discrimination not only exists in the labor market,but also plays an important role in marriage and family life.The research of domestic literature is still not rich enough.Therefore,on the basis of combing the history of the theory of labor discrimination theory and the theory of appearance discrimination,we make some positive additions from two dimensions of labor market and family life to make some empirical studies on the problem of appearance discrimination in China.Using the Chinese comprehensive social survey data(CGSS)2012,this paper analyses whether the appearance,the height as a proxy variable,affects the individual's performance in the labor market and housework.OLS regression shows that there is a significant positive correlation between height and workers' income,and the results of the quantile regression show that there is a difference in the impact of height on different income classes,and the impact on middle income groups is more obvious.For the individual housework,we use the proportion of household chores as the dependent variable,using the Tobit model,find that there is a significant negative correlation between height and housework undertaking,appearance discrimination also exists in family life,and better individuals are more likely to be liberated from housework.In a comprehensive view,this paper first uses normative analysis to carry out a review and summary of the development history of Western labor discrimination theory.Secondly,on the basis of theoretical analysis,we find the insufficiency in the study of discrimination in the domestic labor market and try to make a little supplement from the perspective of the empirical.