“How Do You Say Your Name? Difficult-To-Pronounce Names and Labor Market Outcomes”, 2024-11-01 (; similar):
We test for labor market discrimination based on an understudied characteristic: name fluency. Analysis of recent economics PhD job candidates indicates that name difficulty is negatively related to the probability of landing an academic or tenure-track position and research productivity of initial institutional placement.
Discrimination due to name fluency is also found using experimental data from prior audit studies. Within samples of African Americans (2004) and ethnic immigrants (2011), job applicants with less fluent names experience lower callback rates, and name complexity explains roughly 10–50% of ethnic name penalties.
The results are primarily driven by candidates with weaker résumés, suggesting that cognitive biases may contribute to the penalty of having a difficult-to-pronounce name.