A take by economists on racism in the US

The trial of Ali Ä°smail Korkmaz, the university student who fell into a coma after getting beaten by plainclothes police officers during the Gezi protests and died 38 days later, continued last week. Across the Atlantic, a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager in August.

The two trials say a lot of the speed and efficiency of the Turkish legal system, but my focus is somewhat different. Would the jury have been as lenient if the boy had been white? Raw statistics show that blacks are much more likely than whites to be imprisoned, suspended in school or unemployed. But these could be due to different characteristics between blacks and whites.

Employment deserves special attention. After all, as the late Gary Becker pointed out, Adam Smith’s invisible hand should ensure that racism does not survive in the marketplace. Nonracist employers would grab discriminated workers and drive their racist competitors out of the market. But maybe blacks have higher unemployment rates simply because they have less education and skills. The key question is therefore the following: When faced with two identical candidates, one black the other white, would an employer prefer the white one?

One of the most innovative economics papers I have come across, “Are Emily and Greg more employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination,” tries to answer that question. Economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers in 2001 and 2002, randomly assigning black and white-sounding names to the CVs.

White names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. You...