Culture Change and Name Change

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution writes on Ban the Box (i.e previous convictions on job applications).  The suggestion is that employers who don't get the specific information may revert to disqualifying black applicants based on a possible greater likelihood of past convictions. He cites academic research (see the abstract below the page break).

What hit me was the method the researchers used to tell black and white applicants apart--names.

Now back in the day "black names" (or rather "Negro names") were stereotypically "Washington", "Franklin", "Lincoln", etc., meaning there really wasn't a distinguishable difference.  Which brings me back to Cassius Clay, who famously changed his name. He, along with Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm Little, was part of the early trend of blacks dropping their "slave name" in favor of a more distinctive name, a trend existing alongside the Black Pride and Black Power movements.  These days it seems there's less dropping of surnames, but lot more distinctive given names.  It's ironic that a change which affirms identity has become a means for people to discriminate against that identity.




Ban-the-Box” (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging statistical discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant’s race. To investigate this possibility as well as the effects of race and criminal records on employer callback rates, we sent approximately 15,000 fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, in waves before and after each jurisdiction’s adoption of BTB policies. Our causal effect estimates are based on a triple-differences design, which exploits the fact that many businesses’ applications did not ask about records even before BTB and were thus unaffected by the law.

Our results confirm that criminal records are a major barrier to employment, but they also support the concern that BTB policies encourage statistical discrimination on the basis of race. Overall, white applicants received 23% more callbacks than similar black applicants (38% more in New Jersey; 6% more in New York City; we also find that the white advantage is much larger in whiter neighborhoods). Employers that ask about criminal records are 62% more likely to call back an applicant if he has no record (45% in New Jersey; 78% in New York City) — an effect that BTB compliance necessarily eliminates. However, we find that the race gap in callbacks grows dramatically at the BTB-affected companies after the policy goes into effect. Before BTB, white applicants to BTB-affected employers received about 7% more callbacks than similar black applicants, but BTB increases this gap to 45%.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795795