Systemic Discrimination: Theory and Measurement*

J Aislinn Bohren, Peter Hull and Alex Imas

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025, vol. 140, issue 3, 1743-1799

Abstract: Economists often measure discrimination as disparities arising from the direct effects of group identity. We develop new tools to model and measure systemic discrimination, capturing how discrimination in other decisions indirectly contributes to disparities. A novel experimental design, the iterated audit, identifies systemic discrimination. We illustrate these new tools in two field experiments. The first experiment shows how racial discrimination can accumulate across multiple rounds of hiring through the interaction of two forces: greater discrimination against inexperienced workers, which affects the opportunity to obtain experience, and high subsequent returns to experience. The second experiment shows how gender-based differences in the language of recommendation letters can translate into systemic gender discrimination in STEM hiring. We discuss how our findings qualify previous results on direct discrimination and how our tools can be used to target policy interventions.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjaf022 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:qjecon:v:140:y:2025:i:3:p:1743-1799.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().