Victor Wang

We test for labor market discrimination based on a previously unstudied characteristic: name fluency. Analysis on two recent cohorts of economics PhD job candidates shows that those with difficult-to-pronounce names are less likely to obtain an academic or tenure-track position and are placed at institutions with lower research productivity. Discrimination due to name fluency is also found using experimental data from two prior audit studies. Within a sample of African-American candidates (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004) and a sample of ethnic Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese candidates (Oreopoulos, 2011), job applicants with less fluent names have significantly lower callback rates.