The Impact of Being Monitored on Discriminatory Behavior Among Employers: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
14 Pages Posted: 2 Feb 2009
Abstract
Today there is a variation within the EU to what extent nations allow for situation test results to constitute mass of evidence in court in order to prevent ethnic discrimination. In the UK The Equality and Human Rights Commission has the right to conduct discrimination tests and to even prosecute firms, implying that discriminating firms face the risk of a significant penalty. Other European countries have been reluctant to use such tests as a tool for counteracting discrimination and discuss a much softer version with only monitoring. In this study two labor market field experiments, sending qualitatively identical job applications with randomly assigned Swedish and Middle Eastern sounding names to employers, show that ethnic discrimination exists in hiring in the Swedish labor market. In both studies extensive media coverage occurred when being only halfway finished informing employers of their hiring practices being monitored by such situation testing. This study utilizes these unique events and the data from the experiments to perform a difference-in-differences analysis of whether discrimination decreased after the media coverage. The results reveal no sign of employers changing their hiring practices when being aware of running the risk of being included in such an experiment. This suggests that the detection risk alone is not sufficient if authorities wish to use field experiments as a discrimination prevention strategy. Instead, it must be combined with some penalty to become effective.
Keywords: ethnic discrimination, correspondence testing, situation testing, field experiments
JEL Classification: J64, J71
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians
By Claudia Goldin and Cecilia E. Rouse
-
Fifty Years of Mincer Earnings Regressions
By James J. Heckman, Lance Lochner, ...
-
Fifty Years of Mincer Earnings Regressions
By James J. Heckman, Lance Lochner, ...
-
Sex Discrimination in Restaurant Hiring: An Audit Study
By David Neumark, Roy J. Bank, ...
-
Is it Sex or Personality? The Impact of Sex-Stereotypes on Discrimination in Applicant Selection
-
Instructional Manipulation Checks: Detecting Satisficing to Increase Statistical Power
By Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Tom Meyvis, ...