Racial discrimination in local public services: A field experiment in the US
Racial discrimination in local public services: A field experiment in the US
We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to public services in the U.S.. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We nd that emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer compared to emails signed with a white-sounding name. Moreover, responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests suggest that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus towards blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race. Finally, we show that attitudes towards the government among blacks are more negative in states with higher discrimination.
165-204
Giulietti, Corrado
c662221c-fad3-4456-bfe3-78f8a5211158
Tonin, Mirco
2929ca00-ca4e-4eb3-bf2b-a5d233b80253
Vlassopoulos, Michael
2d557227-958c-4855-92a8-b74b398f95c7
February 2019
Giulietti, Corrado
c662221c-fad3-4456-bfe3-78f8a5211158
Tonin, Mirco
2929ca00-ca4e-4eb3-bf2b-a5d233b80253
Vlassopoulos, Michael
2d557227-958c-4855-92a8-b74b398f95c7
Giulietti, Corrado, Tonin, Mirco and Vlassopoulos, Michael
(2019)
Racial discrimination in local public services: A field experiment in the US.
Journal of the European Economic Association, 17 (1), .
(doi:10.1093/jeea/jvx045).
Abstract
We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to public services in the U.S.. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We nd that emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer compared to emails signed with a white-sounding name. Moreover, responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests suggest that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus towards blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race. Finally, we show that attitudes towards the government among blacks are more negative in states with higher discrimination.
Text
racialdiscrimination_2017_09_25
- Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 21 August 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 18 December 2017
Published date: February 2019
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 415355
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/415355
ISSN: 1542-4766
PURE UUID: cfab8f36-45da-4a61-80a7-8aa311b83e21
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Date deposited: 07 Nov 2017 17:31
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 05:47
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Author:
Mirco Tonin
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