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Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination American Economic Association Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination Author(s): Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Sep., 2004), pp. 991-1013 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592802 Accessed: 26-12-2017 22:25 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms American Economic Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Economic Review This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:25:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination By MARIANNE BERTRAND AND SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN* We study 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. Callbacks are also more respon- sive to resume quality for White names than for African-American ones. The racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry, and employer size. We also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names. Differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the U.S. labor market. (JEL J71, J64). Every measure of economic success reveals significant racial inequality in the U.S. labor market. Compared to Whites, African-Ameri- cans are twice as likely to be unemployed and earn nearly 25 percent less when they are em- ployed (Council of Economic Advisers, 1998). This inequality has sparked a debate as to whether employers treat members of different races differentially. When faced with observ- ably similar African-American and White ap- plicants, do they favor the White one? Some argue yes, citing either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower pro- ductivity. Others argue that differential treat- ment by race is a relic of the past, eliminated by some combination of employer enlightenment, affirmative action programs and the profit- maximization motive. In fact, many in this latter camp even feel that stringent enforcement of affirmative action programs has produced an environment of reverse discrimination. They would argue that faced with identical candi- * Bertrand: Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 1101 E. 58th Street, RO 229D, Chicago, IL 60637, NBER, and CEPR (e-mail: marianne.bertrand@gsb. uchicago.edu); Mullainathan: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive, E52-380a, Cambridge, MA 02142, and NBER (e-mail:
[email protected]). David Abrams, Victoria Bede, Simone Berkowitz, Hong Chung, Almudena Fernandez, Mary Anne Guediguian, Christine Jaw, Richa Maheswari, Beverley Martis, Alison Tisza, Grant Whitehorn, and Christine Yee provided excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to numerous colleagues and seminar participants for very helpful comments. dates, employers might favor the African- American one.' Data limitations make it difficult to empirically test these views. Since researchers possess far less data than employers do, White and African-American workers that appear similar to researchers may look very different to employers. So any racial difference in labor market outcomes could just as easily be attributed to differences that are observable to employers but unobservable to researchers. To circumvent this difficulty, we conduct a field experiment that builds on the correspon- dence testing methodology that has been pri- marily used in the past to stud' minority outcomes in the United Kingdom. We send resumes in response to help-wanted ads in Chi- cago and Boston newspapers and measure call- back for interview for each sent resume. We This camp often explains the poor performance of African-Americans in terms of supply factors. If African- Americans lack many basic skills entering the labor market, then they will perform worse, even with parity or favoritism in hiring. 2 See Roger Jowell and Patricia Prescott-Clarke (1970), Jim Hubbuck and Simon Carter (1980), Colin Brown and Pat Gay (1985), and Peter A. Riach and Judith Rich (1991). One caveat is that some of these studies fail to fully match skills between minority and nonminority resumes. For ex- ample some impose differential education background by racial origin. Doris Weichselbaumer (2003, 2004) studies the impact of sex-stereotypes and sexual orientation. Rich- ard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen (1996) perform a related field experiment to study how employers' response to a criminal past varies between the North and the South in the United States. 991 This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:25:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW experimentally manipulate perception of race via the name of the fictitious job applicant. We randomly assign very White-sounding names (such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker) to half the resumes and very African-American-sounding names (such as Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones) to the other half. Because we are also interested in how credentials affect the racial gap in callback, we experimentally vary the quality of the resumes used in response to a given ad. Higher-quality applicants have on av- erage a little more labor market experience and fewer holes in their employment history; they are also more likely to have an e-mail address, have completed some certification degree, pos- sess foreign language skills, or have been awarded some honors.3 In practice, we typically send four resumes in response to each ad: two higher-quality and two lower-quality ones. We randomly assign to one of the higher- and one of the lower-quality resumes an African- American-sounding name. In total, we respond to over 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories and send nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads we respond to cover a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mail room, to office and sales management positions. We find large racial differences in callback rates.4 Applicants with White names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes. This 50-percent gap in callback is statistically signif- icant. A White name yields as many more call- backs as an additional eight years of experience on a resume. Since applicants' names are ran- domly assigned, this gap can only be attributed to the name manipulation. Race also affects the reward to having a bet- ter resume. Whites with higher-quality resumes receive nearly 30-percent more callbacks than 3 In creating the higher-quality resumes, we deliberately make small changes in credentials so as to minimize the risk of overqualification. 4 For ease of exposition, we refer to the effects uncov- ered in this experiment as racial differences. Technically, however, these effects are about the racial soundingness of names. We briefly discuss below the potential confounds between name and race. A more extensive discussion is offered in Section IV, subsection B. Whites with lower-quality resumes. On the other hand, having a higher-quality resume has a smaller effect for African-Americans. In other words, the gap between Whites and African- Americans widens with resume quality. While one may have expected improved credentials to alleviate employers' fear that African-American applicants are deficient in some unobservable skills, this is not the case in our data.5 The experiment also reveals several other aspects of the differential treatment by race. First, since we randomly assign applicants' postal addresses to the resumes, we can study the effect of neighborhood of residence on the likelihood of callback. We find that living in a wealthier (or more educated or Whiter) neigh- borhood increases callback rates. But, interest- ingly, African-Americans are not helped more than Whites by living in a "better" neighbor- hood. Second, the racial gap we measure in different industries does not appear correlated to Census-based measures of the racial gap in wages. The same is true for the racial gap we measure in different occupations. In fact, we find that the racial gaps in callback are statisti- cally indistinguishable across all the occupation and industry categories covered in the experi- ment. Federal contractors, who are thought to be more severely constrained by affirmative action laws, do not treat the African-American re- sumes more preferentially; neither do larger em- ployers or employers who explicitly state that they are "Equal Opportunity Employers." In Chicago, we find a slightly smaller racial gap when employers are located in more African- American neighborhoods. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section I compares this experiment to earlier work on racial discrimination, and most nota- bly to the labor market audit studies. We describe the experimental design in Section II and present the results in Section III, subsec- tion A. In Section IV, we discuss possible in- terpretations of our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the 5 These results contrast with the view, mostly based on nonexperimental evidence, that African-Americans receive higher returns to skills. For example, estimating earnings regressions on several decades of Census data, James J. Heckman et al. (2001) show that African-Americans experience higher returns to a high school degree than Whites do. SEPTEMBER 2004 992 This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:25:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BERTRAND AND MULLAINATHAN: RACE IN THE