We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomly generated characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of an employer callback by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.8 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, implying that some firms favor male applicants while others favor women. Company-specific contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent and negatively correlated with firm profitability and racial diversity among store managers and board members. Job-level contact gaps exhibit little geographical dispersion, but two digit industry explains more than half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Distributional estimates reveal that racial discrimination is highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile responsible for roughly 50% of the lost callbacks to Black applicants in our study. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 individual companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants, while one discriminates against male applicants. Our findings reveal a stable organizational structure to employment discrimination. |
