Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment

Michael Ewens, Bryan Tomlin and Liang Wang
Additional contact information
Bryan Tomlin: NERA Economic Consulting

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014, vol. 96, issue 1, 119-134

Abstract: A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes statistical discrimination from taste-based discrimination. Responses from over 14,000 rental inquiries with varying applicant quality show that landlords treat identical information from applicants with African American– and white-sounding names differently. This differential treatment varies by neighborhood racial composition and signal type in a manner consistent with statistical discrimination and in contrast to patterns predicted by a model of taste-based discrimination. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: racial discrimination; prejudice; racism; rentals; landlords; housing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J70 J71 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (140)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00365 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment (2012)
Working Paper: Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment
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:tpr:restat:v:96:y:2014:i:1:p:119-134

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().