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

Magnus Carlsson and Dan-Olof Rooth

No 3810, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper contributes 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; correspondence testing; preference-based discrimination; statistical discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J64 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published - revised version published as: "Experimental evidence of discrimination in the hiring of first- and second-generation immigrants", Labour, 2010, 24(3), 263-278

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Working Paper: Is it Your Foreign Name or Foreign Qualifications? An Experimental Study of Ethnic Discrimination in Hiring (2008)
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