Can media attention about tests of ethnic discrimination change the employers’ behaviour?

Situation testing is used to investigate whether employers discriminate when hiring. This study analyzes whether authorities can implement such situation tests to hinder ethnic discrimination and enforce anti-discrimination legislation more effectively by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by news media coverage. To this end, we use unique data that relates an exogenous shock, in the form of extensive media coverage of situation testing conducted in the labor market, to data on employers´ actual discriminatory behavior collected in two situation-testing field experiments. The media coverage, which luckily occurred in the middle of these experiments, and implementation of a difference-in-difference methodology make a causal interpretation of the results possible. Based on previous studies that have shown how the news media can affect economic outcomes, the hypothesis here is that such information, as the news media provided in this case, leads to a decline in the degree of discrimination in the labor market. However, the results reveal no sign of employers changing their hiring practices after the media coverage