November 2011

IZA DP No. 6153: Revealing Taste-Based Discrimination in Hiring: A Correspondence Testing Experiment with Geographic Variation

published in: Applied Economic Letters, 2012, 19 (18), 1861-1864

The standard correspondence testing experiment does not identify whether employer prejudice drives discriminatory behavior when hiring. This article proposes a new methodology using geographic variation to explore the link between employer attitudes toward ethnic minorities and the ethnic difference in callbacks for a job interview. Using already existing Swedish data we find that a randomly selected employer is more likely to discriminate against a minority job applicant in regions where the average employer has more negative attitudes.