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‘Hate at First Sight’: Evidence of Consumer Discrimination Against African-Americans in the US

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  • Morgane Laouenan

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, LIEPP - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d'évaluation des politiques publiques (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po)

Abstract

The paper tests evidence of customer discrimination against African-Americans in the US using a two-sector matching model with racial sector-specific preferences or abilities, employer discrimination, and customer discrimination. The test strategy makes it possible to disentangle customer from pure employer discrimination. This paper proves the existence of discrimination against African-Americans at job entry from both employers and consumers in the US. It also reports that racial prejudice has a quantitative effect on the relative employment and contact probabilities of African-Americans. A decrease in the intensity of discrimination by one standard deviation would raise the raw employment rate of African-Americans by 10% and would increase the proportion of African-Americans in jobs in contact with customers by 25%.

Suggested Citation

  • Morgane Laouenan, 2017. "‘Hate at First Sight’: Evidence of Consumer Discrimination Against African-Americans in the US," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-01514654, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-01514654
    DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2017.03.008
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01514654v1
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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