Do government officials discriminate?

By Corrado Giulietti, Mirco Tonin, and Michael Vlassopoulos   Suppose you write an email to a school district or a library asking for information about enrolling your child to the school or becoming a library member. Do you expect to receive a reply? And do you expect this reply to be cordial, for instance including some form of salutation? It turns out that the answers to the two questions above depend on what your name is and on what it embodies. In a field experiment whereby we send emails signed by fictitious male senders to almost 20,000 local public services […]