An Overview of Recent Correspondence Tests

In a recent IZA working paper, Stijn Baert offers a long list of correspondence tests: field experiments where equivalent CV are sent to employer to capture discrimination in hiring. What’s quite exciting about this list is that it covers all kinds of characteristics, from nationality to gender, from religion to sexual orientation. What’s also great is the promise to keep this list up-to-date on his website. At the same time, the register does not describe the inclusion criteria in great detail. I was surprised not to find some of the studies Eva Zschirnt and I included in our meta-analysis on the list, despite our making all the material available on Dataverse. Was this an oversight — the title of the working paper includes an “almost” –, or was this due to inclusion criteria? What I found really disappointing was the misguided focus on p-values to identify the ‘treatment effect’. All in all a useful list for those interested in hiring discrimination more generally.