Is it Your Foreign Name or Foreign Qualifications? An Experimental Study of Ethnic Discrimination in Hiring

Magnus Carlsson

No 2009:2, CAFO Working Papers from Linnaeus University, Centre for Labour Market Policy Research (CAFO), School of Business and Economics

Abstract: This paper contribute to the existing literature on ethnic discrimination of immigrants in hiring by addressing the central question of what employers act on in a job application. The method involved sending qualitatively identical resumes signalling belonging to different ethnic groups to firms advertising for labour. The results show that whether the applicant has a native sounding or a foreign sounding name explains approximately 77 per cent of the total gap in the probability of being invited to an interview between natives and immigrants, while having foreign qualifications only explains the remaining 23 per cent. This in turn, suggests a lower bound for statistical discrimination of approximately 23 per cent of total discrimination. The analysis indicates further that the 77 per cent are most likely driven by a mixture of preference-based and statistical discrimination.

Keywords: ethnic discrimination; hiring; job search; preference-based discrimination; statistical discrimination; correspondence testing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J64 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2008-07-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vxu.se/ehv/filer/forskning/cafo/wps/Nek_wp2_09.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Working Paper: Is It Your Foreign Name or Foreign Qualifications? An Experimental Study of Ethnic Discrimination in Hiring (2008)
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:hhs:vxcafo:2009_002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAFO Working Papers from Linnaeus University, Centre for Labour Market Policy Research (CAFO), School of Business and Economics Centre for Labour Market Policy Research (CAFO), School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, SE 351 95 Växjö, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andreas Mångs ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).