Ethnic Discrimination in Germany’s Labour Market: A Field Experiment

By Leo Kaas, C. Manger. Social Science Research Network, 2012

557 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper studies ethnic discrimination in Germany’s labour market with a correspondence test. We send two similar applications to each of 528 advertisements for student internships, one with a Turkish-sounding and one with a German-sounding name. A German name raises the average probability of a callback by about 14%. Differential treatment is particularly strong and significant in smaller firms at which the applicant with the German name receives 24% more callbacks. Discrimination disappears when we restrict our sample to applications including reference letters which contain favourable information about the candidate’s personality. We interpret this finding as evidence for statistical discrimination.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6abafc223d4d1c6adda2dfc92850d23e0ac86f84

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Citations in the corpus

Race and Marriage in the Labor Market: A Discrimination Correspondence Study in a Developing Country (2014, methodology): “Following Lahey & Beasley (2009), we randomized characteristics across CVs(9) and created 10 sets of 8 CVs each for six different majors and two experience levels;(10) hence, our bank of CVs has 960 different CVs.”
Ethnic Discrimination in the Dutch Labor Market (2012, result): “This difference is significant at the 1% level, and is very much in line with results found in Germany for callback differences between German and Turkish applicants (Kaas & Manger, 2010).”
Ethnic discrimination in hiring: comparing groups across contexts. Results from a cross-national field experiment (2019, background): “Typically, the largest or most salient ethnic group is included (Andriessen et al. 2012; Kaas and Manger 2012; Midtbøen 2014; Wood et al. 2009).”
A multidisciplinary survey on discrimination analysis (2013, background): “Rather than being an explanatory variable, prior knowledge has the effect of perpetuating the vicious cycle of discrimination described in Section 2.3.”
Field Experiments on Discrimination (2016, background): “The publication of a correspondence testing study for Germany (Kaas and Manger, 2012) triggered a lively public debate about discrimination in the hiring decisions of German firms.”
Discrimination Against Female Migrants Wearing Headscarves (2016, methodology): “It is also possible that larger firms discriminate less because they follow a more standardized, and therefore more objective, evaluation process than small companies (Kaas and Manger 2012).”
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology Zahra or Zoe, Arjun or Andrew? Bicultural Baby Names Reflect Identity and Pragmatic Concerns (background): “There is a growing literature suggesting that minority group members who have ethnic names may experience discrimination in the job market (e.g., Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Kaas & Manger, 2012) and in the rental housing market (Carpusor & Loges, 2006).”
Discrimination in grading: experimental evidence from primary school teachers (2012, methodology): “In these experiments, identical application letters and CVs are sent out, bearing either European or foreign names (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Carlsson and Rooth 2007; Kaas and Manger 2010).”