Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment
By Michael Ewens, B. Tomlin, Liang Choon Wang. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014
233 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes statistical discrimination from taste-based discrimination. Responses from over 14,000 rental inquiries with varying applicant quality show that landlords treat identical information from applicants with African American– and white-sounding names differently. This differential treatment varies by neighborhood racial composition and signal type in a manner consistent with statistical discrimination and in contrast to patterns predicted by a model of taste-based discrimination.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a16827fb2b5bd38bc1c7c7e8333fe4d354d20ef3
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In Sociology and Political Science
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- Marianne Bertrand
- A. Hanson
- Justin M. Rao
- Ravi Shroff
- Susan Athey
- Christian Hansen
Citations in the corpus
- Unexplored dimensions of discrimination in Europe: homosexuality and physical appearance (2015, unknown): “[46] Ewens, M.”
- Field Experiments on Discrimination (2016, background): “The exercise can be performed with observational data (See Fisman et al. (2008), Hitsch et al. (2010), and Banerjee et al.”
- Precinct or Prejudice? Understanding Racial Disparities in New York City's Stop-and-Frisk Policy (2016, background): “Also, there is evidence that officers follow “scripts of suspicion” when filling out forms to justify stops [Fagan and Geller (2014)].”
- Discrimination in mortgage lending: Evidence from a correspondence experiment☆ (2016, background): “All rights reserved. hent et al. (2014) find that for 30 year adjustable rate mortages African Americans borrowers face interest rates 12 basis oints higher than non-Hispanic borrowers.”