STATISTICAL DISCRIMINATION OR PREJUDICE? A LARGE SAMPLE FIELD EXPERIMENT

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ewens, Michael; Tomlin, Bryan; Wang, Liang Choon
• 署名单位: Carnegie Mellon University; Monash University
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00365
• 发表日期: 2014-03
• 页码: 119-134
• 关键词: racial-discrimination; housing-market; INFORMATION

摘要

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.