Identifying preference-based employer discrimination : a field experiment

The standard correspondence testing experiment does not identify whether employer prejudice, as opposed to statistical discrimination, drives discriminatory behavior when hiring. This article proposes a new methodology using geographic variation to explore the link between employer attitudes toward ethnic minorities and the ethnic difference in callbacks for a job interview. Using already existing Swedish data we find that a randomly selected employer is more likely to discriminate against a minority job applicant in regions where the average employer has more negative attitudes