Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from Retail Sales

Alan Benson, Simon Board and Moritz Meyer

The Review of Economic Studies, 2024, vol. 91, issue 4, 1956-1987

Abstract: We propose a simple model of racial bias in hiring that encompasses three major theories: taste-based discrimination, screening discrimination, and complementary production. We derive a test that can distinguish these theories based on the mean and variance of workers’ productivity under managers of different pairs of races. We apply this test to study discrimination at a major U.S. retailer using data from 48,755 newly hired commission-based salespeople. White, black, and Hispanic managers within the same store are significantly more likely to hire workers of their own race, consistent with all three theories. For black–Hispanic pairs, productivity variance is lower for same-race pairs than cross-race pairs, implying that screening discrimination dominates. For white–Hispanic pairs, mean productivity is higher for same-race pairs, indicating a combination of screening discrimination and complementary production. For white–black pairs, biased hiring implies the presence of discrimination, but productivity results suggest the effects of the three forms of discrimination offset one another.

Keywords: Discrimination; Screening; Hiring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdad087 (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:restud:v:91:y:2024:i:4:p:1956-1987.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().