Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/123178 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5537
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Discrimination in access to public services can act as a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality. We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to a wide spectrum of public services in the US. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails are less likely to receive a response if signed by a black-sounding name compared to a white-sounding name. Given a response rate of 72% for white senders, emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer. We also find that 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.
Subjects: 
discrimination
public services provision
school districts
libraries
sheriffs
field experiment
correspondence study
JEL: 
D73
H41
J15
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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