Alexander Coppock

Since 1983, more than 70 employment audit experiments, carried out in more than 26 countries across five continents, have randomized the gender of fictitious applicants to measure the extent of hiring discrimination on the basis of gender. The results are mixed: Some studies find discrimination against men, and others find discrimination against women. We reconcile these heterogeneous findings through a “meta-reanalysis” of the average effects of being described as a woman (versus a man), conditional on occupation. We find a strongly positive gender gradient. In (relatively better paying) occupations dominated by men, the effect of being a woman is negative, while in the (relatively lower paying) occupations dominated by women, the effect is positive. In this way, heterogeneous employment discrimination on the basis of gender preserves status quo gender distributions and earnings gaps. These patterns hold among both minority and majority status applicants.

Despite the increasing sums devoted to online political advertising, our understanding of the persuasive effects of such advertising is limited. We report the results of a ZIP code level randomized field experiment conducted over Facebook and Instagram during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections in Florida. The ads, produced by a Democratic-leaning political action committee, were designed to spur Democratic vote share and were seen more than 1.1 million times with over 100,000 full views. This wide saturation notwithstanding, we find that these advertisements had very small estimated effects on Democratic vote share at the precinct level (−0.04 percentage points, SE: 0.85 points). Our results underline the challenges of political persuasion via digital advertisements, particularly in competitive electoral contexts.