How many correspondence tests are enough to detect discrimination among single agents? A longitudinal study on the Belgian real estate market

Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe and Koen Van der Bracht

No 678, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: Correspondence tests have been used by scholars and civil rights organizations to measure ethnic discrimination. In contrast to research testing covering a whole market through many discrimination tests, litigation testing typically targets a single agent, which can only be tested through a very low number of tests per agent. This low number of tests poses serious methodological challenges to disentangle systematic discrimination from random treatment. This study examines from a purely statistical point of view how many discrimination tests per single agent are needed to convincingly proof discrimination. We collected unique longitudinal data about 114 real estate agents, which were tested through 10 repeated pairwise matched correspondence tests. It appears that 10 or more tests are needed per realtor to detect discrimination with a high degree of certainty. The required number of tests per agent depends on the pattern of discrimination among the agent under study, the expected non-response rate and the desired degree of certainty.

Keywords: discrimination; discrimination tests; mid-p-value; longitudinal study; housing market; enforcement testing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J70 J78 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/224764/1/GLO-DP-0678.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:678

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().