For almost 50 years field experiments have been used to study ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring decisions, consistently reporting high rates of discrimination against minority applicants – including immigrants – irrespective of time, location, or minority groups tested. While Peter A. Riach and Judith Rich [2002. “Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place.” The Economic Journal 112 (483): F480–F518] and Judith Rich [2014. “What Do Field Experiments of Discrimination in Markets Tell Us? A Meta Analysis of Studies Conducted since 2000.” In Discussion Paper Series. Bonn: IZA] provide systematic reviews of existing field experiments, no study has undertaken a meta-analysis to examine the findings in the studies reported. In this article, we present a meta-analysis of 738 correspondence tests in 43 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 1990 and 2015. In addition to summarising research findings, we focus on groups of specific tests to ascertain the robustness of fi...

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/142176/1/Zschirnt%20Ruedin%202016%20Meta%20Pre-Print.pdf

Ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions: a meta-analysis of correspondence tests 1990–2015

The collection and analysis of observational and experimental data represent the main tools for assessing the presence, the extent, the nature, and the trend of discrimination phenomena. Data analysis techniques have been proposed in the last 50 years in the economic, legal, statistical, and, recently, in the data mining literature. This is not surprising, since discrimination analysis is a multidisciplinary problem, involving sociological causes, legal argumentations, economic models, statistical techniques, and computational issues. The objective of this survey is to provide a guidance and a glue for researchers and anti-discrimination data analysts on concepts, problems, application areas, datasets, methods, and approaches from a multidisciplinary perspective. We organize the approaches according to their method of data collection as observational, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies. A fourth line of recently blooming research on knowledge discovery based methods is also covered. Observational methods are further categorized on the basis of their application context: labor economics, social profiling, consumer markets, and others.

/pdf/a-multidisciplinary-survey-on-discrimination-analysis-4bfzpiipme.pdf

A multidisciplinary survey on discrimination analysis

For almost 50 years field experiments have been used to study ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring decisions, consistently reporting high rates of discrimination against minority applicants - including immigrants -, irrespective of time, location, or minority groups tested. While Riach and Rich (2002) and Rich (2014) provide systematic reviews of existing field experiments, no study has undertaken a meta-analysis to examine the findings in the studies reported. In this article we present a meta-analysis of 730 correspondence tests in 42 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 1990 and 2015. In addition to summarizing research findings, we focus on subgroups to ascertain the robustness of findings, emphasizing differences across countries, gender, and economic contexts. Moreover we test hypotheses with regard to taste-based and statistical discrimination. To this end, we draw on the fact that the groups considered in correspondence tests and the contexts of testing vary to some extent. We focus on first- and second generation immigrants, differences between specific minority groups, the implementation of EU directives, and the length of job application packs. There are many indications that ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions reflects taste-based discrimination, although in some cases statistical discrimination seems to occur.

Ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions: A meta-analysis of correspondence tests 1990–2015

Understanding whether labor market discrimination explains inferior labor market outcomes for many groups has drawn the attention of labor economists for decades—at least since the publication of Gary Becker's The Economics of Discrimination in 1957. The decades of research on discrimination in labor markets began with a regression-based "decomposition" approach, asking whether raw wage or earnings differences between groups—which might constitute prima facie evidence of discrimination—were in fact attributable to other productivity-related factors. Subsequent research—responding in large part to limitations of the regression-based approach—moved on to other approaches, such as using firm-level data to estimate both marginal productivity and wage differentials. In recent years, however, there has been substantial growth in experimental research on labor market discrimination—although the earliest experiments were done decades ago. Some experimental research on labor market discrimination takes place in the lab. But far more of it is done in the field, which makes this particular area of experimental research unique relative to the explosion of experimental economic research more generally. This paper surveys the full range of experimental literature on labor market discrimination, places it in the context of the broader research literature on labor market discrimination, discusses the experimental literature from many different perspectives (empirical, theoretical, and policy), and reviews both what this literature has taught us thus far, and what remains to be done.

/pdf/experimental-research-on-labor-market-discrimination-op0kkasekx.pdf

Experimental Research on Labor Market Discrimination

This article reviews the existing field experimentation literature on the prevalence of discrimination, the consequences of such discrimination, and possible approaches to undermine it. We highlight key gaps in the literature and ripe opportunities for future field work. Section 2 reviews the various experimental methods that have been employed to measure the prevalence of discrimination, most notably audit and correspondence studies; it also describes several other measurement tools commonly used in lab-based work that deserve greater consideration in field research. Section 3 provides an overview of the literature on the costs of being stereotyped or discriminated against, with a focus on self-expectancy effects and self-fulfilling prophecies; Section 4 also discusses the thin field-based literature on the consequences of limited diversity in organizations and groups. The final section of the paper, Section 4 , reviews the evidence for policies and interventions aimed at weakening discrimination, covering role model and intergroup contact effects, as well as sociocognitive and technological debiasing strategies.

/pdf/field-experiments-on-discrimination-4vfntxfr0q.pdf

Field Experiments on Discrimination

. This paper studies ethnic discrimination in Germany's labour market with a correspondence test. We send two similar applications to each of 528 advertisements for student internships, one with a Turkish-sounding and one with a German-sounding name. A German name raises the average probability of a callback by about 14%. Differential treatment is particularly strong and significant in smaller firms at which the applicant with the German name receives 24% more callbacks. Discrimination disappears when we restrict our sample to applications including reference letters which contain favourable information about the candidate's personality. We interpret this finding as evidence for statistical discrimination.

/pdf/ethnic-discrimination-in-germany-s-labour-market-a-field-5cxmtgt6xp.pdf

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany's Labour Market: A Field Experiment

This paper studies ethnic discrimination in Germany's labour market with a correspondence test. To each of 528 advertisements for student internships we send two similar applications, one with a Turkish-sounding and one with a German-sounding name. A German name raises the average probability of a callback by about 14 percent. Differential treatment is particularly strong and significant at smaller firms at which the applicant with the German name receives 24 percent more callbacks. Discrimination disappears when we restrict our sample to applications including reference letters which contain favourable information about the candidateﾒs personality. We interpret this finding as evidence for statistical discrimination.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/dp4741.pdf?abstractid=1552675&mirid=1

This paper studies ethnic discrimination in Germany's labour market with a correspondence test To each of 528 advertisements for student internships we send two similar applications, one with a Turkish-sounding and one with a German-sounding name A German name raises the average probability of a callback by about 14 percent Differential treatment is particularly strong and significant at smaller firms at which the applicant with the German name receives 24 percent more callbacks Discrimination disappears when we restrict our sample to applications including reference letters which contain favourable information about the candidate’s personality We interpret this finding as evidence for statistical discrimination

Christian Manger

Papers

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany's Labour Market: A Field Experiment

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany's Labour Market: A Field Experiment

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany's Labour Market: A Field Experiment

Behind the scenes: Urban secretaries as managers of legal and diplomatic conflicts in the Baltic region, c.1470–1540

#Inviteme: Can Social Media Information Reduce Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment