Testing for redlining in the labour market

Can subsidies paid directly to employers reduce residential discrimination in employment? An assessment based on serial field experiments

“…This seminal study showed that living in a privileged neighbourhood increases the chances of success. This result has also been reported in other countries, particularly in France (Bunel et al, 2016;L'Horty et al, 2019).…”

The Price of Prejudice

“…We achieve this combination by hiring juveniles for a job that is perfectly natural to thempreparing letters for a mailing-and have them do the job in office facilities, under conditions we tightly control. 2 The main innovation of our design is that it allows us to vary the price a discriminator has to pay, and to control the information potential discriminators have about that price. Our approach thereby allows us to observe discrimination when discrimination is costly to the discriminator.…”

“…In treatment Info, we provide the decision maker with information about the individual productivity of the two candidates, i.e., the number of letters they prepared in round 1, and their first names as a marker of ethnicity. Because the 2 The combination of tight control and subject unawareness has been implemented previously, e.g., in experimental studies of labor markets. It is common practice to call such experiments "natural field experiments" even when the job is performed on the premises of a university; see e.g., Gneezy and List (2006) or Kube, Maréchal, and Puppe (2013) who recruit students to catalogue the holdings of a small library at a university.…”

Cyclical behavior of hiring discrimination: evidence from repeated experiments in France

“…In the five waves of our correspondence study, the fictitious candidates are located in the eight départements that make up the Ile-de-France region 8 and respond to job offers located in their département . We made this choice of location in order to limit the distance between their homes and the workplaces in the job offers, a factor which is taken into account by employers in Paris region (L’Horty et al 2019 ). This allowed us to study the relationships between discrimination and tensions in the labor market which differ, both over time and between départements .…”

“…Our objective is to measure how labor market discrimination evolves for French citizens of North African descent and residents of deprived neighborhoods in different economic circumstances. Ethnic origin is the most studied discrimination criteria with place of residence being less systematically considered in correspondence studies (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004 ; Duguet et al 2010 ; Tunstall et al 2014 ; Bunel et al 2016 ; L'Horty et al 2019 ).…”