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International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

VOLUME 6

OAXACA, RONALD–QUOTAS, TRADE

William A. Darity Jr.

EDITOR IN CHIEF

OAXACA, RONALD

1944–

Ronald Oaxaca is the McClelland Professor of Economics

and faculty associate at the Economics Science Laboratory

at the University of Arizona. Best known to many econo-

mists as the developer of the Oaxaca wage decomposition

technique for examining wage differentials, he has con-

ducted research and published extensively since the 1970s

on topics such as labor economics, applied econometrics,

and applied microeconomics including sex, union, and

race differentials and discrimination; unemployment and

unemployment insurance; and the minimum wage.

Oaxaca is perhaps best known for developing one of

the most important methods used in the field of labor

economics to study wage discrimination based on sex and

race known as the wage gap decomposition, which he out-

lined in his 1973 article “Male-Female Wage Differentials

in Urban Labor Markets.” Also influenced by economist

Alan S. Blinder, the wage gap decomposition provides a

means for identifying residual differences between

observed and predicted wages that are not accounted for

by characteristics associated with productivity, such as

education and skill, and can thus be attributed to labor

market discrimination and other omitted variables. The

seminal method has since been refined and elaborated

upon to add other elements of analysis, such as the use of

alternative wage structures as reference points for compar-

ison; selectivity bias; comparative analysis across countries

and time; the explanation of penalties associated with

motherhood; and analysis of discrimination across the

income distribution rather than using means. Oaxaca has

also continued to utilize and improve upon the wage

decomposition, notably with Michael R. Ransom in two

studies conducted in 1994 and 1999 (as mentioned in

Yana van der Meulen Rodgers’s 2006 article “A Primer on

Wage Gap Decompositions in the Analysis of Labor

Market Discrimination”), further refining methods for

developing the nondiscriminatory wage structure and

emphasizing the importance of the reference group for

estimating the unexplained or discriminatory portion of

the wage gap.

More recently Oaxaca has focused on topics such as

the influences of ability and family background on opti-

mal schooling levels; the effects of dual job holding; statis-

tical discrimination; and consistent estimators of linear

probability models. His continued study of gender differ-

entials in wages includes work to examine the impact of

technology and to compare trends in the United States

and Denmark. Further he is conducting research on such

disparate subjects as determinants of faculty salaries, the

production of engineering degrees, optimal sick pay

schemes, gender bias in the criminal justice system, and

measurement error in work experience. He currently

serves as the coeditor of American Economic Review , and

he is on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic

Inequality. From 1986 to 1989 he was on the editorial

board of the Journal of Urban Economics , and he previ-

ously coedited Economic Inquiry. To date he has published

over seventy articles, working papers, and book reviews.

Oaxaca is also a teacher who has been a member of

over seventy thesis committees since 1978. He joined the

faculty of the University of Arizona in 1976 (after teach-

ing at the University of Massachusetts from 1973 to

1976) and has been a visiting professor at a number of

institutions, including Smith College (1975); Princeton

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Obedience, Destructive

University (1982); Stanford University (1983–1984);

New Mexico State University (1991), where he was a

Distinguished Visiting Professor; the University of Aarhus

in Denmark (1997); and ERMES at the University of

Paris II (2003). He is an active member of the Association

for Hispanic Economists.

Oaxaca was a fellow of the Udall Center at the

University of Arizona from 1995 to 1996 and since 2001

has been a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of

Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. In 2005 Hispanic

Business magazine selected Oaxaca to appear on the list of

the 100 most influential Hispanics.

Oaxaca earned a bachelor’s of science (summa cum

laude with honors) from California State University at

Fresno (1965) and a master’s (1969) and doctorate (1971)

in economics from Princeton University.

SEE ALSO Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition Technique;

Econometric Decomposition

mands, progressing to the maximum shock. The unex-

pectedly high rate of destructive obedience was the central

and most dramatic finding in Milgram’s experiments.

While we did not need Milgram to tell us that people tend

to obey authorities, the sheer power of that finding was

revelatory: that ordinary people would act contrary to

conscience and hurt an innocent person at the bidding of

an authority without coercive means to enforce his or her

commands.

Milgram conducted over twenty different variations

in his series of experiments on destructive obedience. A

second important insight is provided by a subset of those

variations. In that series Milgram varied the distance

between the teacher and the learner. As the distance was

reduced, so was the percentage of obedient subjects. The

morality of shocking an innocent victim did not change

from condition to condition, but the tendency to obey the

destructive orders did, demonstrating that the immediate

situation can have powerful effects on behavior even at the

expense of the subject’s personal inclinations.

Milgram undertook his research to shed light on the

Holocaust in an attempt to explain how normal people

could become complicit in carrying out the murderous

commands of Nazi leaders. Although early twenty-first

century regulations in the United States and other coun-

tries make it virtually impossible to replicate Milgram’s

experiments, experiences in real life continue to affirm his

findings.

For example, in 2004 two male students at a Georgia

high school obeyed their teacher’s orders to throw an

unruly female classmate out the window. Real-life events

also have broadened the scope of destructive obedience in

several ways. For instance, it is known that destructive

obedience can take place even when the self is the victim.

A review of airplane accidents between 1978 and 1990

found that in about 25 percent of cases the first officer’s

reluctance to correct an error made by his or her captain

was a contributing factor. Also the power of destructive

obedience when the action is damaging in a nonphysical

manner is as strong as or stronger than is the case when

the obedient act is physically destructive, strong enough

to override a person’s moral or ethical principles. As a

teaching exercise, a University of San Diego law professor,

Steven Hartwell, had his students advise a client on how

best to present her side of a rent dispute in court. Hartwell

told them to advise the client to lie under oath and say

that she had paid her rent. Twenty-three of twenty-four

subjects complied and told the woman to perjure herself.

SEE ALSO Authoritarianism; Authority; Conformity;

Holocaust, The; Milgram, Stanley; Nazism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Oaxaca, Ronald L. 1973. Male-Female Wage Differentials in

Urban Labor Markets. International Economic Review 14 (3):

693–709.

Rodgers, Yana van der Meulen. 2006. A Primer on Wage Gap

Decompositions in the Analysis of Labor Market

Discrimination. In Handbook on the Economics of

Discrimination , ed. William M. Rodgers, III. Cheltenham,

UK: E. Elgar Publishing.

Elizabeth Nisbet

William M. Rodgers III

OBEDIENCE,

DESTRUCTIVE

Obedience is the act of compliance to the commands of a

legitimate authority. In destructive obedience the acquies-

cence is to a command to harm another person. The

phrase was first introduced into the social sciences in 1963

by Stanley Milgram in his article “Behavioral Study of

Obedience” in the Journal of Abnormal and Social

Psychology describing the first of a series of experiments on

obedience he conducted at Yale University from 1961 to

1962.

In those experiments the subject was told to teach a

learner a series of word pairs, using increasingly painful

electric shocks—up to 450 volts—as punishment for each

error. Although the shocks were fake and the learner was

an actor who feigned his suffering, the experiment was

stressful for most of the subjects. Sixty-five percent of the

subjects were fully obedient to the experimenter’s com-

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Obese Externality

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blass, Thomas, ed. 2000. Obedience to Authority: Current

Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum.

Blass, Thomas. 2004. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life

and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books.

Hartwell, Steven. 1990. Moral Development, Ethical Conduct,

and Clinical Education. New York Law School Law Review 35

(1): 131–161.

Milgram, Stanley. 1963. Behavioral Study of Obedience. Journal

of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (4): 371–378.

Milgram, Stanley. 1974. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental

View. New York: Harper and Row.

Schachter’s research was correlational, showing that

obesity is associated with externality. He assumed that

externality (in an environment rife with food cues) causes

obesity. But what is the source of externality? Schachter

postulated that impairment of the brain’s ventromedial

hypothalamus (VMH) was responsible; rats with VMH

damage behaviorally resemble obese humans. This line of

reasoning was extended by Schachter’s student Richard

Nisbett (1972), who argued that suppression of VMH

functioning was a consequence of weight suppression by

dieting or other means, which is common among the

obese. This proposal led in turn to research by C. Peter

Herman and Janet Polivy (1980) on restrained eating

(dieting), which hinged on the notion that even normal-

weight people who suppress their weight ought to be espe-

cially external. Work on restrained eating, however,

quickly turned away from questions of internal versus

external. The Eating Disorders Inventory contains a scale

concerned with interoception, the perception of one’s own

internal states, which is weak in those with eating disor-

ders; but again, the eating disorders literature pays scant

attention to Schachter’s internal/external distinction.

Challenges to the obese-externality theory include

the argument that internal and external cues reciprocally

influence each other and are thus inseparable. Research

shows that external cues (such as social influence and por-

tion size) exert such a powerful influence on food intake

in everyone that it is misleading to identify external

responsiveness exclusively with the obese. Still, Schachter’s

original proposal has not been disproved so much as

superseded by subsequent formulations, all of which owe

a debt to his groundbreaking demonstrations of how eat-

ing may be studied experimentally and creatively.

Thomas Blass

OBESE EXTERNALITY

In the late 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley

Schachter (1922–1997) proposed that obese people eat

(and overeat) not because of hunger, stress, or boredom,

but in response to external (i.e., environmental) food cues,

which drive eating in the obese until those cues are

removed (or consumed). External food cues include the

sight or smell of palatable food and other salient cues in

the situation indicating that eating is appropriate. When

external cues are absent, the obese are not motivated to

eat, even if they are substantially food-deprived. This

focus on internal and external cues is often seen as origi-

nating in Schachter’s earlier research on emotion,

although a close reading reveals significant differences in

Schachter’s analyses of these two domains.

Schachter’s obese-externality theory achieved wide-

spread attention because it challenged long-standing ideas

about the causes of obesity by means of several innovative

and dramatic experiments. These experiments showed

that obese people’s food intake is less affected by manipu-

lations of food deprivation and distress than is that of nor-

mal-weight people. Obese individuals, for instance, are

less disturbed by time-zone changes or by the require-

ments of religious fasting, as long as food cues are not

prominent. These clever studies, written with great flair,

were complemented by studies demonstrating that obese

people are differentially affected by manipulations of

external cues, ranging from varying the visual prominence

of food cues (by, for example, altering the lighting or pro-

viding nuts either shelled or unshelled) to doctoring a

clock (so that dinnertime arrived either early or late) to

offering experimental subjects either one or three sand-

wiches to eat. These studies fascinated the research com-

munity, even if the data were not always robust.

SEE ALSO Nutrition; Obesity; Overeating; Schachter,

Stanley

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herman, C. Peter, and Janet Polivy. 1980. Restrained Eating. In

Obesity , ed. A. J. Stunkard, 208–225. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Nisbett, Richard E. 1972. Hunger, Obesity, and the

Ventromedial Hypothalamus. Psychological Review 79:

433–453.

Schachter, Stanley. 1968. Obesity and Eating. Science 161:

751–756.

Schachter, Stanley. 1971. Some Extraordinary Facts about Obese

Humans and Rats. American Psychologist 26: 129–144.

C. Peter Herman

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

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