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

The paper runs the customer discrimination test provided by Combes et al. (2013) on US data. This test is based on a two-sector matching model with racial sector-specific preferences or abilities, employer discrimination and customer discrimination. The strategy makes it possible to disentangle customer from employer discrimination. My results prove 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 blacks. A decrease in the intensity of discrimination by one standard deviation raises the raw employment rate of blacks by 15 percent and increases the proportion of blacks in jobs in contact with customers by 20 percent.