Foreign Accents and Employer Beliefs: Experimental Evidence on Hiring Discrimination

Elisa Taveras (), Ozlem Tonguc (), Maria Zhu and Nicola Miller
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Elisa Taveras: The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Ozlem Tonguc: State University of New York
Nicola Miller: Binghamton University, New York

No 18239, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This study investigates whether employers in an online hiring experiment exhibit discrimination based on workers’ accents that indicate English is not their primary language. To assess accent bias, we implement a randomized treatment design in which participants acting as employers are assigned to one of two conditions: a treatment where the worker’s accent is revealed (“Accent Revealed”) or a control where it is not (“Accent Blind”). Using incentive-compatible methods, we elicit employers’ beliefs about the productivity of randomly assigned workers, providing brief demographic information and audio clips that either reveal or mask accent characteristics. We evaluate worker productivity in two skills: Mathematics and Verbal reasoning. We find that employers rate accented workers as less capable than their non-accented counterparts in both skills, and this gap persists after providing employers with a signal of a worker’s test score. Employers also display lower willingness to pay, particularly in Verbal skills tasks, even when provided with performance signals.

Keywords: laboratory experiments; labor market discrimination; foreign accent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D90 J01 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lma
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