Ethnical discrimination in Europe: Field evidence from the finance industry

• The integration of ethnical minorities has been a hotly discussed topic in the political, societal, and economic debate. Persistent discrimination of ethnical minorities can hinder successful integration. Given that unequal access to investment and financing opportunities can cause social and economic disparities due to inferior economic prospects, we conducted a field experiment on ethnical discrimination in the finance sector with 1,218 banks in seven European countries. We contacted banks via e-mail, either with domestic or Arabic sounding names, asking for contact details only. We find pronounced discrimination in terms of a substantially lower response rate to e-mails from Arabic senders. Remarkably, the observed discrimination effect is robust for loan- and investment-related requests, across rural and urban locations of banks, and across countries. © 2018 Stefan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Nationalekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

article

e-mail

Europe

field experiment

finance

human

investment

nomenclature

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)