Accent Discriminations In The Labor Market

Abstract

This article looks for accent discrimination. I do a correspondence study in the restaurant service markets in the Marseille region, France, by sending fictitious job applications to real job offers. Fictitious job candidates differ by the accent, the name and the address. Employers hear applicants' accent in their answering machine and they read applicants' name and address in their resume. I check whether message rates conditional on employers make phone contacts are lower for applicants with a poor area accent than for those with a French ``standard" accent. I find the poor area accent is discriminated since the message rate difference is -8.30 %. A by product of this study is that the origin discrimination overwhelms the address one.