Reading Guide: "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?"
1. Give a 3 minute summary of the paper. What is the hypothesis of the paper? Why is it interesting or useful?
2. Discuss previous studies on discrimination (pseudo experiments and labor market audit studies). What are the problems/ limitations of these studies?
3. Detail the paper's experiment. How were the resumes created? How were the jobs selected? How did the authors choose the fictitious names for the experiment?
4. What are some weaknesses of this experiment?
5. Does discrimination in the labor market exist? Discuss Table 1 and Table 2. Who are the discriminating employers?
6. How do the authors control for social background? How do they separate racial discrimination from socioeconomic discrimination? Discuss Table 11.
7. Discrimination can be thought of in three ways: customer discrimination, employee discrimination and statistical discrimination. Discuss each kind.