10 resumes to get one callback whereas applicants with African American names need to send around 15
resumes to get one callback. This 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant. Based on
our estimates, a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience. Since
applicants’ names are randomly assigned, this gap can only be attributed to the name manipulation.
Race also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes receive 30
percent more callbacks than Whites with lower quality resumes, a statistically significant difference. On the
other hand, having a higher quality resume has a much smaller effec t for African Americans. In other words,
the gap between White and African-Americans widens with resume quality. While one may have expected
that improved credentials may alleviate employers’ fear that African American applicants are deficient in
some unobservable skills, this is not the case in our data.
4
Discrimination therefore appears to bite twice,
making it harder not only for African Americans to find a job but also to improve their employability.
The experiment also reveals several other aspects of discrimination. First, since we randomly assign
applicants’ postal addresses to the resumes, we can study the effe ct of neighborhood of residence on the
probability of callback. We find that living in a wealthier (or more educated or more White) neighborhood
increases callback rates. But, interestingly, African Americans are not helped more than Whites by living
in a “better” neighborhood. Second, the amount of discrimination we m eas ure by industry does not appear
correlated to Census-based measures of the racial gap by industry. The same is true for the amount of
discrimination we measure in different occupations. In fact, we find that discrimination levels are statistically
indistinguishable across all the occupation and industry c ategories covered in the experiment. We also find
that federal contractors, who are thought to be more severely constrained by affirmative action laws, do
not discriminate less; neither do larger employers or employers who explicitly state that they are an “Equal
Opportunity Employer” in their ads. In Chicago, we find that employers located in more African American
neighborhoods are slightly less likely to discriminate.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 compares this experiment to prior work on
discrimination, and most notably to the labor market audit studies. We describe the experimental design
in Section 3 and present the results in Section 4.1. In Section 5, we discuss p os sible interpretations of
our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the race-specific names we have
chosen might also proxy for so c ial class above and beyond the race of the applicant. Using birth certificates
data on mother’s education for the different names used in our sample, we find little relationship betwe en
social background and the name specific callback rates.
5
Second, we discuss how our results map back
effects are about th e racial soundingness of names. We briefly discuss the potential confounds between name and race below
and more extensively in Section 5.1.
4
These results contrast with the view, mostly based on non-experimental evidence, that African Americans receive higher
returns to skills. For example, estimating earnings regressions on several decades of Census data, Heckman et al. (2001) show
that African Americans experience higher returns to a high school degree than Whites.
5
We also argue that a social class interpretation would find it hard to explain all of our results, such as why living a better
neighborho od does not incre ase callback rates more for African American n ame s than for White names.
3