@techreport{NBERw9904, title = "The Economics of 'Acting
White'", author = "David Austen-Smith and Roland G. Fryer",
institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research", type =
"Working Paper", series = "Working Paper Series", number =
"9904", year = "2003", month = "August", URL =
"http://www.nber.org/papers/w9904", abstract = {This paper
formalizes a sociological phenomenon entitled 'acting white'.
The key idea is that individuals face a tension between
signaling their type to the outside labor market and signaling
their type to a peer group: signals that induce high wages can
be signals that induce peer rejection. We prove three basic
results: (1) there exists no equilibria in which all types of
individuals adopt distinct educational investment levels; (2)
when individuals are not too patient, all equilibria satisfying
a standard refinement involve a binary partition of the type
space in which all types accepted by the group pool on a common
low education level and all types rejected by the group separate