The Demographic Context of Hiring Discrimination: Evidence from a Field Experiment in 50 Metropolitan Statistical Areas

Abstract

How do the demographic contexts of urban labor markets correlate with the extent to which racial and ethnic minorities are disadvantaged at the hiring stage? This paper builds on two branches of labor market stratification literature to link demographic contexts of labor markets to race- and ethnicity-based hiring discrimination that manifest within them. Relying on a unique large-scale field experiment that involved submitting nearly 12,000 fictitious resumes to real job postings across 50 major urban areas, I found that Black population size is associated with greater discrimination against Black candidates, providing support for the “visibility-discrimination” thesis. I also show that this thesis cannot be extended straightforwardly to comparisons between Whites and other ethnic minority groups: I found no evidence of an association between Latino and Asian concentration and the labor market outcomes of those groups relative to Whites. The paper concludes with theoretical implications for studies of race and stratification, labor markets, and urban inequalities.