Cette thèse est composée de trois articles qui posent chacun une question sur les discriminations. Le premier article interroge si les habitants de la Seine-Saint-Denis sont statistiquement discriminés sur une violence supposée ; où la pratique d’un sport de combat serait un signal de violence. Le second article regarde si les accents marseillais sont discriminés sur le marché du travail. Le dernier article se demande si les employeurs pourraient utiliser le patronyme et l’adresse des candidats à l’embauche pour faire des corrélations sur leur accent et, s’ils infèrent qu’ils ont l’accent des grands ensembles, de les discriminer sur ce point. La méthode du « testing » est utilisée pour répondre à ces trois questions. Les deux premiers testings amènent à répondre par la négative aux deux premières questions. Concernant la troisième question, même si l’on ne peut pas y répondre, le troisième testing prouve que l’accent des grands ensembles est discriminé. De plus, il démontre que la discrimination sur le patronyme peut mettre dans l’ombre celle sur l’adresse. De façon générale, ce travail permet de mettre en évidence que les employeurs ne prennent pas en compte le sport dans leur pratique d’embauche et que lors de l’élaboration du design d’un testing on doit distinguer les signaux forts des signaux faibles. Il montre aussi que les testings peuvent être utilisés jusqu’au moment où les employeurs contactent les candidats par téléphone et qu’ils engagent des stéréotypes différents selon l’accent qu’ils entendent. Enfin, il propose aux décideurs publics de chercher à d’abord diminuer la discrimination basée sur le patronyme s’ils veulent diminuer la discrimination totale. / This thesis is composed of three articles. Each of them asks one question about discriminations. The first article interrogates if Seine-Saint-Denis inhabitants are statistically discriminated on a supposed violence ; where to do a fighting sport would be a violence signal. The second article investigates if Marseille accents are discriminated in the labor market. The third article asks if employers may use the name and the address as proxies to determine job candidates’ accent and, if they infer he holds a poor area accent, to discriminate on the basis of this accent. I use the correspondence study method to reply to these three questions. The first two correspondence studies lead to conclude to the negative to the first two questions. Concerning the third question, even if we cannot reply to it, the third correspondence study proves that the poor area accent is discriminated. Moreover, it shows that the name discrimination may overcomes the address one.General conclusions are that this thesis indicates employers do not take into account the practiced sport to hire and that to elaborate the design of a correspondence study implies to consider weak and strong signals. It also shows that correspondence studies can be used up to the moment where employers contact job applicants by phone and that they have different stereotypes in mind according to the accent they hear. Finally, it proposes to public policy makers to first decrease the name discrimination if they want to significantly impact the total discrimination.

This thesis is composed of four self-contained papers and focuses on discrimination in themarket place. Essay 1: “Disability Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market – A Field Experiment onBlind Tenants.” Although discrimination against disabled people has been investigated inthe labor market, the housing market has received less attention in this regard. This paperfocuses on the latter market and investigates whether blind tenants assisted by guide dogsare discriminated against in the rental housing market. The data are collected through afield experiment in which written applications were sent in response to onlineadvertisements posted by different types of advertisers. I find statistically significantevidence that one type of online advertiser, that is, the apartment owner (i.e., a person whoadvertises and rents out his/her own apartment(s) on his/her own), discriminates againstblind tenants, because of the presence of the guide dog, not because of the disability.According to the legislation, this behavior qualifies as illegal discrimination. Essay 2: “Does the design of correspondence studies influence the measurement of discrimination?”(co-authored with Carlsson and Rooth). Correspondence studies can identify the extent ofdiscrimination in hiring as typically defined by the law, which includes discriminationagainst ethnic minorities and females. However, as Heckman and Siegelman (1993) show,if employers act upon a group difference in the variance of unobserved variables, thismeasure of discrimination may not be very informative. This issue has essentially beenignored in the empirical literature until the recent methodological development byNeumark (2012). We apply Neumark’s method to a number of already publishedcorrespondence studies. We find the Heckman and Siegelman critique relevant forempirical work and give suggestions on how future correspondence studies may address thiscritique. Essay 3: “Does Labor Market Tightness Affect Ethnic Discrimination in Hiring?” (co-authoredwith Carlsson and Rooth). In this study, we investigate whether ethnic discriminationdepends on labor market tightness. While ranking models predict a negative relationship,the prediction of screening models is ambiguous about the direction of the relationship.Thus, the direction of the relationship is purely an empirical issue. We utilize three (butcombine into two) correspondence studies of the Swedish labor market and two distinctlydifferent measures of labor market tightness. These different measures produce very similarresults, showing that a one percent increase in labor market tightness increases ethnicdiscrimination in hiring by 0.5-0.7 percent, which is consistent with a screening model.This result stands in sharp contrast to the only previous study on this matter, Baert et al.(forthcoming), which finds evidence that supports a ranking model. Essay 4: “Relative Age Effect on Labor Market Outcomes for High Skilled Workers – Evidencefrom Soccer.” In sports and education contexts, children are divided into age groups that arearbitrary constructions based on admission dates. This age-group system is thought todetermine differences in maturity between pupils within the same group, that is, relative904627 Luca Furmaco_inl.indd 5 2015-02-24 16:58age (RA). In turn, these within-age-group maturity differences produce performance gaps,that is, relative age effects (RAEs), which might persist and affect labor market outcomes. Ianalyze the RAE on labor market outcomes using a unique dataset of a particular group ofhigh-skilled workers: soccer players in the Italian major soccer league. In line with previousstudies, evidence on the existence of an RAE in terms of representativeness is found,meaning that players born relatively early in an age group are over-represented, whileplayers born relatively late are under-represented, even accounting for specific populationtrends. Moreover, players born relatively late in an age group receive lower gross wages thanplayers born relatively early. This wage gap seems to increase with age and in the quantileof the wage distribution.