Does Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment

We conduct a large-scale field experiment to measure labour market discrimination in Australia, one quarter of whose population was born overseas. To denote ethnicity, we use distinctively Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle Eastern names. We compare multiple ethnic groups, rather than a single minority as in most other studies. In all cases we applied for entry-level jobs and submitted a CV indicating that the candidate attended high school in Australia. We find significant differences in callback rates: ethnic minority candidates would need to apply for more jobs in order to receive the same number of interviews. These differences vary systematically across ethnic groups. ‘After completing TAFE in 2005 I applied for many junior positions where no experience in sales was needed – even though I had worked for two years as a junior sales clerk. I didn’t receive any calls so I decided to legally change my name to Gabriella Hannah. I applied for the same jobs and got a call 30 minutes later.’ ∼Gabriella Hannah, formerly Ragda Ali, Sydney ÅFor valuable comments, we are grateful to two anonymous referees, Boyd Hunter, Gigi Foster, Steven Haider, and seminar participants at the 2010 World Conference of the European Association of Labour Economists and the Society of Labor Economists, theAustralianNationalUniversity’s Social and PoliticalTheory Seminar, theAustralian National University Centre forAboriginal Economic Policy Research seminar, theAustralasian Labour Econometrics Workshop, and Monash University. Iktimal Hage-Ali and Amy King put us in touch with Gabriella Hannah, who is quoted at the start of the paper. Pablo Mateos kindly allowed us to use a beta version of his Onomap software to impute ethnicity to the names of employers. Mathias Sinning provided invaluable programming assistance and Susanne Schmidt outstanding research assistance. The background section of this paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics inAustralia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDAProject was initiated and is funded by theAustralian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and IndigenousAffairs (FaHCSIA) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (MIAESR). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either FaHCSIA or the MIAESR. We take very seriously the ethical issues surrounding this research. Our experiment received approval from the Australian National University’s Human Research Ethics Committee. It involves some deception of participants – for a thoughtful discussion on the ethics of deception in such field experiments, see Riach and Rich (2004). JEL Classification numbers: J71, C93.