Measuring discrimination: what do field experiments of markets tell us?

What are field experiments of markets and what does this research tell us about discriminatory behaviour and practices? Field experiments do not aim to draw national conclusions and generalisations about the extent (or not) of discrimination in the way that wage regression analysis does. What they do aim to do is to detect discrimination within an area of markets that they survey. In this chapter some brief background information on field experiments is provided for those unfamiliar with this work. Then the findings of field experiments are discussed in two parts: field experiments conducted over the period 1966 to 2000; field experiments conducted over the period 2000 to 2010. Finally, some comments are made about innovations to the testing procedure undertaken in these recent field experiments.