Discriminatory Lending: Evidence from Bankers in the Lab

Abstract : We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment with 334 Turkish loan officers to document gender discrimination in small business lending and to unpack the mechanisms at play. Each officer reviews multiple real-life loan applications in which we randomize the applicant's gender. While unconditional approval rates are the same for male and female applicants, loan officers are 26 percent more likely to require a guarantor when we present the same application as coming from a female instead of a male entrepreneur. A causal forest algorithm to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects reveals that this discrimination is strongly concentrated among young, inexperienced, and gender-biased loan officers. Discrimination mainly affects female loan applicants in male-dominated industries, indicating how financial frictions can perpetuate entrepreneurial gender segregation across sectors.

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The Effect of Inclusive Policies on Economic Types of Discrimination

Abstract : Inclusive policies that implement inter-group contact has been found to increase or to decrease discrimination in the empirical literature. These conflicting results might originate from differences in addressed types of discrimination – i.e. whether discriminatory behavior arises from differences in tastes or beliefs – and differences in contact’s capacity to alter tastes and beliefs. This article investigates the causal effect of contact on statistical and taste-based discrimination as well as on the associated anticipation effects of the latter. In our experiment, republicans and democrats are assigned to teams comprising out-group members or to remain in homogeneous teams, interact in a cooperative task, and subsequently play different games apt to elicit their discriminatory tastes and beliefs about out-groups. Our contact intervention remedied taste-based discrimination by about 45%, and had no significant impact on inter-group trust and on statistical discrimination. Derived lessons for policymakers concerned with the reduction of discrimination involve features that inclusive policies should strive for by changing preferences or beliefs, and thereby reducing different types of discrimination.

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Daddy's Girl: How Daughters Shape Managerial Decisions and Gender Gaps

Abstract : Do managers’ gender attitudes affect gender gaps within the workplace? Building on previous work showing that parenting daughters affects fathers’ gender attitudes, we exploit birth events within firms and show that females’ relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% in firms where male managers experience the birth of their first daughter. These effects are driven by a change in the gender mix of new hires and by an increase in managers’ propensity to hire women with post-secondary education, who work full time, and who are high earners relative to the firm’s salary distribution. Finally, as we do not find any effect on firm performance, we conclude that the observed improvement in gender equality did not undermine firm efficiency.

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