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Research ArticleArticles

Detecting Discrimination in Audit and Correspondence Studies

David Neumark
Journal of Human Resources, October 2012, 47 (4) 1128-1157; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.47.4.1128
David Neumark
David Neumark is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Economics & Public Policy at UCI, a research associate of the NBER, and a research fellow at IZA. He is grateful to the UCI Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries for research support, to Scott Barkowski, Marianne Bitler, Richard Blundell, Thomas Corneliβen, Ying-Ying Dong, Judith Hellerstein, James Heckman, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at Baylor University, Cal State Fullerton, Cornell University, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Hebrew University, the Melbourne Institute, the University of Oklahoma, Tel Aviv University, the University of Sydney, and the All-California Labor Conference for helpful comments, and to Scott Barkowski, Andrew Chang, Jennifer Graves, and Smith Williams for research assistance. He also thanks Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan for supplying their data, available from the AEA website at doi =
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Abstract

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However, Heckman and Siegelman (1993) show that group differences in the variance of unobservable determinants of productivity still can generate spurious evidence of discrimination in either direction. This paper shows how to recover an unbiased estimate of discrimination when the correspondence study includes variation in applicant characteristics that affect hiring. The method is applied to actual data and assessed using Monte Carlo methods.

  • Accepted November 2011.
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Journal of Human Resources: 47 (4)
Journal of Human Resources
Vol. 47, Issue 4
2 Oct 2012
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Detecting Discrimination in Audit and Correspondence Studies
David Neumark
Journal of Human Resources Oct 2012, 47 (4) 1128-1157; DOI: 10.3368/jhr.47.4.1128

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Detecting Discrimination in Audit and Correspondence Studies
David Neumark
Journal of Human Resources Oct 2012, 47 (4) 1128-1157; DOI: 10.3368/jhr.47.4.1128
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  • Article
    • Abstract
    • I. Introduction
    • II. Background on Audit and Correspondence Studies
    • III. The Heckman-Siegelman Critique
    • IV. Detecting Discrimination
    • V. Evidence, Implementation, and Assessment
    • VI. The Meaning of Discrimination
    • VII. Conclusions and Discussion
    • Appendix 1. Monte Carlo Assessment
    • Footnotes
    • References
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