Bertrand, Marianne and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review, 94 (2004), 991–1013.
Studies race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews.
Price, Joseph and Justin Wolfers (2010) . “Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(4): 1859-1887.
Shows that more personal fouls –another split-second decision-- are awarded against players by opposite-race officials than by same-race officials. These biases are large enough to affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games.
Parsons, Christopher, Johan Sulaeman, Michael Yates, and Daniel S. Hamermesh (2011). “Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives and Evaluation”. American Economic Review 101(4)
In baseball, umpires have some discretion in whether to rule a given pitch a ball (to the batter’s advantage) or a strike (to the pitcher’s advantage.) In making these split-second decisions, the authors show that umpires tend to be more generous to pitchers of their own race than other pitchers. This bias is dramatically reduced, however, when the umpires are more closely monitored by their employers: Specifically, when electronic measures of the pitch’s location are present in the ballpark, umpires exhibit less own-race favoritism. Notably, this study shows that umpires’ behavior means that the relative productivity of black pitchers is systematically underestimated in major league baseball. A pure, race-neutral pay-for-performance policy would therefore not reward equally productive workers equally.
Bertrand, Marianne and Esther Duflo. 2016. “Field Experiments on Discrimination” NBER working paper no. 22014
Reviews the existing field experimentation literature on the prevalence of discrimination, the consequences of such discrimination, and possible approaches to undermine it.
Bartoš, Vojtěch, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Filip Matějka “Attention Discrimination: Theory and Field Experiments” American Economic Review vol. 106, no. 6, June 2016 pp. 1437-75.
Field experiments in two countries show that negatively stereotyped minority names reduce employers' effort to inspect resumes. In contrast, minority names increase information acquisition in the rental housing market. Both results are consistent with a model of endogenous allocation of costly attention.
Becker, Gary. The Economics of Discrimination 2d ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Becker’s seminal work models the economic effects of taste-based discrimination in the market place because of race, religion, sex, color, social class, personality, or other non-pecuniary considerations. Here, Becker introduces the concepts of employer, employee, and customer discrimination and analyses their predicted effects on wages, employment, profits and workplace segregation.
Arrow, Kenneth J. 1973 “The Theory of Discrimination”. in Ashenfelter, Orley and Albert Rees, eds. Discrimination in Labor Markets. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Develops the theoretical model of statistical discrimination where firms have incomplete information about workers.
Lundberg, Shelly J. and Richard Startz. “Private Discrimination and Social Intervention in Competitive Labor Markets”. American Economic Review 73(3) (June 1983), 340-347.
Presents a simple model of statistical discrimination and examines the effects of prohibiting group-specific treatment of workers on both net social product and the distribution of income. The main result is that the allocation achieved by rational agents in this labor market can be improved by prohibiting discrimination based on group membership.
Bertrand, Marianne, Dolly Chugh, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2005. “Implicit Discrimination.” American Economic Review 95(2): 94-98.
Presents a new interpretation of discrimination—implicit discrimination, which is unintentional and outside of the discriminator’s awareness. Implicit attitudes could be measured using Implicit Association Test (IAT), which outperforms explicit attitude measures in terms of its correlation with less-controllable behavioral outcomes. This could partly explain racial discrimination.
Note: see Section 22.3 for references on Affirmative Action
Heckman, James J. and Brooks S. Payner, “Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina”. American Economic Review March 1989; 79(1): 138-77.
Assesses the contribution of federal antidiscrimination policy to the dramatic improvement of black economic status in South Carolina manufacturing in the mid-1960s. Shows that neither human capital, supply shifts, nor tight labor market conditions can account for the black breakthrough. Instead, the authors conclude that the Civil Rights Act allowed employers to hire black workers despite the strong opposition of their incumbent, white workforces.
Coate, Stephen and Glenn C. Loury, “Will Affirmative Action Eliminate Negative Stereotypes?”, American Economic Review 83 (5) (December 1993): 1220-1240.
Studies the joint determination of employer beliefs and worker productivity in a model of statistical discrimination in job assignments. Shows that even when identifiable groups are equally endowed ex ante, affirmative action can bring about a situation in which employers (correctly) perceive the groups to be unequally productive, ex post.
Goldin, Claudia and Cecilia Rouse, “Orchestrating impartiality: the impact of Blind auditions on female musicians,” American Economic Review 90 (2000), 715–741.
American orchestras’ adoption of "blind" auditions --which use a screen to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. The authors find that using the screen increased the probability a woman will be advanced and hired.
Surowiecki, James, (2014). “Valley Boys,” The New Yorker, Nov 24.
On hiring bias in Silicon Valley.
Baert, Stijn, (2017). "Hiring Discrimination: An Overview of (Almost) All Correspondence Experiments Since 2005," IZA discussion paper number 10738.
Provides an exhaustive list of all (i.e. 90) correspondence studies on hiring discrimination that were conducted between 2005 and 2016 (and could be found through a systematic search). For all these studies, the direction of the estimated treatment effects is tabulated. In addition, a discussion of the findings by discrimination ground is provided.
Zaleski, Katharine, (2018). “Job Interviews without Gender,” New York Times, January 6.
Although research suggests that gender-making tools and the related trend of “blind-hiring” might be a promising way to keep sexism out of the hiring process, it might just be a partial solution. A bigger problem emerges that it allows companies to ignore the challenges of making their environments more inclusive.
Hedegaard, Morten Størling and Jean-Robert, Tyran, (2018). “The Price of Prejudice.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 10(1):40-63.
Presents a new type of field experiment to investigate ethnic prejudice in the workplace, which allows them to study how potential discriminators respond to changes in the cost of discrimination. Results suggest that ethnic discrimination is common but highly responsive to the "price of prejudice," i.e., to the opportunity cost of choosing a less productive worker on ethnic grounds.
Kessler, Judd B., Corinne Low and Colin D. Sullivan “Incentivized Resume Rating: Eliciting Employer Preferences without Deception” American Economic Review 2019, 109(11): 3713–3744
Like resume audit studies, incentivized resume rating (IRR) is an experimental method for studying how employers choose successful candidates from a pool of applicants. In this new approach, experienced recruiters evaluate resumes they know are hypothetical; recruiters are motivated to do this honestly and carefully because their ratings will influence which real resumes they will eventually receive. Key benefits of IRR, relative to audit studies, are that (a) they do not require deception of employers, and (b) they can elicit employers’ beliefs that the applicant will accept the offer, which is a confounding factor in audit studies.
Neumark, David. 2020. Age Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from Age-Blind vs. Non-Age-Blind Hiring Procedures NBER working paper no. 26623
Hiding older worker’s ages in job applications raises their chances of their getting an interview, but these workers then encounter much lower job offer rates after their interviews (which reveal their age). The author interprets this evidence as strongly consistent with age discrimination.
Cowgill, Bo, and Patryk Perkowski. 2020 Delegation in Hiring: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 898.
More and more employers are delegating the recruitment process to firms and individuals in the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) industry. This paper studies the behavior of RPO recruiters using an extension of the traditional resume audit methodology that can measure the effects of both employers’ and workers’ preferences on labor market matching. It finds that recruiters’ career concerns lead them to misallocate callbacks by catering to employers’ preferences for alumni of big companies and elite schools, who are then "over-interviewed" relative to their probability of joining the firm.
Egan, Mark, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru. 2022 When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct Journal of Political Economy, volume 130, number 5, May 2022.
The authors study gender differences in punishment for misconduct in the financial advisory industry. There is a “gender punishment gap”: following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs, relative to male advisers. The gender punishment gap is not driven by gender differences in occupation, productivity, nature of misconduct, or recidivism. The punishment gap is smaller in firms with a greater percentage of female managers and executives. The authors also find that men are more tolerant of members of their own ethnic group when those members commit misconduct.
Kline, Patrick, Evan K Rose, Christopher R Walters 2022. Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
The authors use a massive nationwide correspondence experiment that sent more than 83,000 fictitious applications to jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Their goal is to see whether individual firms tend to discriminate more than other firms; they find that discrimination against resumes with distinctively Black names is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be identified with high confidence using large-scale inference methods.
Alan, Sule and Louis-Pierre LePage 2022 “Learning to Discriminate on the Job” unpublished paper, University of Minnesota.
Using administrative records from a large national US retailer, the authors find that managers learn to discriminate ``on the job'' as they gain experience hiring workers of different races. First, they find that idiosyncratically positive and negative previous experiences with Black hires seed the race of future hires, consistent with managers updating their beliefs about the productivity of these workers based on their hiring history. Second, the degree of updating is larger for Black than White workers, consistent with managers having weaker priors. Third, because positive experiences increase black hiring and negative ones decrease it, negative biases are slower to self-correct than positive ones. Fourth, these dynamics, combined with the fact that black workers are already in a minority, yield particularly large and protracted declines in Black hiring following a manager's negative experiences. The results suggest that managers develop biased beliefs from endogenous learning about racial groups, which systematically disadvantages minority workers.
Benson, Alan, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue 2021. "Potential" and the Gender Promotion Gap unpublished paper, University of Minnesota.
The authors show that widely-used subjective assessments of employee “potential” contribute to gender gaps in promotion and pay. Specifically, in data on 30,000 management-track employees from a large retail chain, women receive substantially lower potential ratings despite receiving higher job performance ratings. These lower potential ratings do not appear to be based on accurate forecasts of future performance: in the future, women outperform male colleagues with the same potential ratings. Furthermore, these differences in assessed potential account for 30-50% of the gender promotion gap.
Haegele, Ingrid. 2022 “The Broken Rung: Gender and the Leadership Gap” unpublished paper, UC Berkeley.
To help understand why women are underrepresented in corporate leadership positions, the author uses data from a large multinational firm that combines detailed personnel records with the universe of internal application and job vacancies. She show that women at lower hierarchy levels are 29% less likely to apply for promotions. No such gaps exist among employees who already hold leadership positions, indicating the presence of a broken (bottom) rung rather than a glass ceiling. Large-scale surveys at the firm reveal that taking on leadership of a team is much less appealing to women than men at lower hierarchy levels. This difference cannot be explained by gender differences in family status, risk preferences, or confidence.
Bircan, Cagatay, Guido Friebel and Tristan Stahl. 2022 “Knowledge Teams, Careers, and Gender” unpublished paper, University College London
The authors study gender promotion gaps in an international financial institution. Regardless of whether they have children, women have significantly slower careers. A crucial mechanism for this difference is early assignments to jobs that are visible to the upper echelons of the organization, which favor men.
Bar, Revital; Zussman, Asaf. 2017. “Customer Discrimination: Evidence from Israel” Journal of Labor Economics 35:4, pp. 1031-1059.
The authors study customer discrimination against Arab workers in the Israeli market for labor-intensive services. Relying on surveys, field data, and a natural experiment, they provide evidence consistent with Becker’s customer discrimination model. First, a significant share of Jewish customers prefer to receive labor-intensive services from firms employing Jewish rather than Arab workers; these preferences are most strongly linked to concerns for personal safety. Second, customer preferences affect firms’ hiring decisions. Third, firms employing Arab workers charge significantly lower service prices than those employing only Jewish workers.
Roussille, Nina, 2024 The Central Role of the Ask Gap in Gender Pay Inequality Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. Using data from Hired.com –where candidates for engineering jobs must post an ask salary—Roussille finds that women ask for 3.3 percent lower salaries after adjusting for resume characteristics. This gap fully explains the 1.8 percent gender gap in final salaries received by women using the platform. However, both these gaps can be eliminated by providing workers with better, objective information about salaries in their field and location.
Glover, Dylan, Amanda Pallais and William Pariente (2016). “Discrimination as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from French Grocery Stores,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 132(3):1219-1260.
Examines the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain and shows that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance.
Li, Xuan. 2020 The Costs of Workplace Favoritism: Evidence from Promotions in Chinese High Schools. Unpublished paper, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Li shows that favoritism exists in Chinese public high schools: teachers with hometown or college ties to the school principal are twice as likely to be promoted. Further, teachers who have observed such unfair promotions in their school in the past respond by reducing their value-added and quitting more frequently. These adverse spillover incentive effects reduced school-wide performance. Both favoritism and its negative consequences were reduced by a transparency reform that made principals’ promotion decisions more visible.
Folke, Olle and Johanna Rickne 2022 Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
The authors combine nationally representative survey data and administrative data to show that both harassment and wages vary strongly and systematically across workplaces. Women self-report more harassment from colleagues and managers in male-dominated workplaces where wages are relatively high, and men self-report more harassment in female-dominated workplaces where wages are low. These patterns reinforcing the gender wage gap, because women avoid high-wage jobs, men avoid lower-wage jobs, in both cases to avoid harassment.
Adams-Prassl, Abi, K. Huttunen, E. Nix & N. Zhang. 2022 Violence Against Women at Work: Victim and Firm Effects unpublished paper, Oxford University.
Between-colleague conflicts are common. The authors link every police report in Finland to administrative data to identify assaults between colleagues, and economic outcomes for victims, perpetrators, and firms. They document large, persistent labor market impacts of between-colleague violence on victims and perpetrators. Male perpetrators experience substantially weaker consequences after attacking women compared to men. Perpetrators' economic power in male-female violence partly explains this asymmetry. Male-female violence causes a decline in women at the firm. There is no change in within-network hiring, ruling out supply-side explanations via "whisper networks". Only male-managed firms lose women. Female managers do one important thing differently: fire perpetrators.
Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne 2022 Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 137, Issue 4, November 2022, Pages 2163–2212.
The authors use nationally representative administrative data to show that the amount of sexual harassment varies strongly and systematically across workplaces: Women self-report more harassment from colleagues and managers in male-dominated workplaces where wages are relatively high, and men self-report more harassment in female-dominated workplaces where wages are low. Using a survey experiment, the authors argue that harassment deters women and men from applying for jobs in workplaces where they are the gender minority. Using data on workplace transitions, the authors also show that sexual harassment leads workplace gender minorities to leave their workplaces for new jobs. Together, these mechanisms work to perpetuate gender segregation in employment and the sexual harassment that tends to accompany it.
Caselli, Mauro, Paolo Falco, and Gianpiero Mattera 2023 When the Stadium Goes Silent: How Crowds Affect the Performance of Discriminated Groups Journal of Labor Economics 41(2). April 2023
Using a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, the authors test how the sudden absence of fans at football games impacts player performance in Italy. They find that African players, who are most commonly targeted by racial harassment, play better when fans are no longer at the stadium. Using official records of racist behavior by fans, the authors show that performance improves the most on teams where such behavior was more common before the lockdown. Thus, racist pressure aimed at specific workers (players) appears to have reduced those workers’ productivity.
Christensen, Peter and Christopher Timmins 2023 “The Damages and Distortions from Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
By constraining an individual’s choice during a search, housing discrimination distorts sorting decisions away from true preferences. Combining a large-scale field experiment with a residential sorting model, the authors show that key neighborhood amenities are associated with higher levels of discrimination. Counterfactual simulations based on the sorting model suggest that discrimination imposes damages equivalent to 4.4% and 3.5% of the annual incomes for African American and Hispanic/Latinx renters, respectively.
Agan, Amanda and Sonja Starr, (2017). “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(1):191-235.
Sends approximately 15,000 online job applications on behalf of fictitious young, male applicants to employers before and after the adoption of BTB policies, varied whether the applicant had a distinctly black or distinctly white name and the felony conviction status of the applicant. Results show that criminal records are a major barrier to employment, and BTB policies encourage racial discrimination.
Miller, Conrad. 2017 The Persistent Effect of Temporary Affirmative Action. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9(3): 152=90.
Employers who subject to Federal Affirmative Action requirements for even short periods exhibit an increase in Black employment shares even years they are no longer subject to regulation.
Ajunwa, Ifeoma. “Beware of Automated Hiring” New York Times, October 8. 2019.
The author discusses a number of pitfalls associated with It algorithmically-based hiring, and argue that it could accentuate, rather than eliminate discrimination in the hiring process.
Rambachan, Ashesh, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Jens Ludwig (2020) An Economic Perspective on Algorithmic Fairness AEA Papers and Proceedings 2020, 110: 91–95.
The authors use the methods of welfare economics to study the optimal design of algorithms used in a variety of contexts, including personnel selection. The socially optimal regulation of algorithms depends on whether the designer can be forced to disclose how the algorithm works, including the data, training procedure and decision rule. If disclosure is not possible, optimal regulation might involve prohibiting algorithms from using certain characteristics, such as race and gender, in their procedures.
Tommasini, Anthony. To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions New York Times, July 18, 2020.
While blind auditions have dramatically raised women’s representation in top orchestras, they have had little or no effect on racial diversity. Arguing that the musicianship and technique of the top candidates are virtually indistinguishable, the author proposes that hiring should also place weight on qualities like talent as an educator, interest in unusual repertoire or willingness to program innovative chamber events as well as pure musicianship.
Agan, Amanda Y., Bo Cowgill and Laura K. Gee. “Salary Disclosure and Hiring: Field Experimental Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit Study”. (no link currently available).
Barach, Moshe A. and John J. Horton, forthcoming. "How Do Employers Use Compensation History? :Evidence From a Field Experiment," Journal of Labor Economics SSRN.
Reports the results of a field experiment in which treated employers could not observe the compensation history of their job applicants. Treated employers responded by evaluating more applicants, and evaluating those applicants more intensively. They also responded by changing what kind of workers they evaluated.
Mocanu, Tatiana 2022 Designing Gender Equity: Evidence from Hiring Practices and Committees unpublished paper, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The author uses tens of millions of high-dimensional, unstructured records on hiring in Brazil’s public sector into study the effects of a policy reform that required the use of more impartial hiring practices, She finds that increasing screening impartiality improves women’s evaluation scores, application rates, and probability of being hired. The reforms that were most effective in raising women’s hiring chances were i) adding blind written tests to subjective hiring methods like interviews, or ii) converting subjective methods into only blind written tests. Gender-balanced hiring committees also induce male evaluators to become more favorable toward female candidates in subjective stages.