>We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago

>We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase.[1] >researchers created resumes for black and Asian applicants and sent them out for 1,600 entry-level jobs posted on job search websites in 16 metropolitan sections of the United States. Some of the resumes included information that clearly pointed out the applicants’ minority status, while others were whitened, or scrubbed of racial clues…Twenty-five percent of black candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes, while only 10 percent got calls when they left ethnic details intact. Among Asians, 21 percent got calls if they used whitened resumes, whereas only 11.5 percent heard back if they sent resumes with racial references[such as name changes, removing membership in organizations, scholarships, or achievements that might reveal race]. [2] >Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago sent 83,000 fictitious applications for entry-level job postings to 108 Fortune 500 employers, using randomly assigned and racially distinctive names. They found that distinctively Black names on applications with reduced the likelihood of hearing back from an employer by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively White names. But differences in contact rates varied substantially across firms. About 20% of the companies were responsible for roughly half of the discriminatory behavior in the experiment. [3] [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 [2] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-applicants-with-black-names-still-less-likely-to-get-the-interview https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...