Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment

Michael Ewens; Bryan Tomlin; Liang Choon Wang

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00365

Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment

Michael Ewens¹; Bryan Tomlin²; Liang Choon Wang³

¹ Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University , · ² NERA Economic Consulting, · ³ Department of Economics, Monash University

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2014

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.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00365
Volume: 96 (1)
Pages: 119-134
Language: en
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