Systemic Discrimination among Large U.S. Employers

Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose () and Christopher Walters
Additional contact information
Evan K. Rose: University of Chicago

No 14634, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between-company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, revealing that some firms favor male applicants while others favor women. Company-specific racial contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent, and negatively correlated with firm profitability, federal contractor status, and a measure of recruiting centralization. Discrimination exhibits little geographical dispersion, but two digit industry explains roughly half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Contact gaps are highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile of racial discrimination responsible for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants in the experiment. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 individual companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants. Our findings establish that systemic illegal discrimination is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be identified with high confidence using large scale inference methods.

Keywords: discrimination; audit studies; empirical bayes; q-values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C9 C93 J7 J71 J78 K31 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-exp, nep-isf, nep-law, nep-lma, nep-ore and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published - published in: Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, 137 (4), 1963 - 2036

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Journal Article: Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers (2023)
Working Paper: Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers (2021)
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