Endophilia or Exophobia: Beyond Discrimination

The discrimination literature treats outcomes as relative. But does a differential arise because agents discriminate against others—exophobia—or because they favour their own kind—endophilia? Using a field experiment that assigned graders randomly to students' exams that did/ did not contain names, we find favouritism but no discrimination by nationality, but neither by gender. We are able to identify these preferences under a wide range of behavioural scenarios regarding the graders. That endophilia dominates exophobia alters how we should measure discriminatory wage differentials and should inform the formulation of anti-discrimination policy.<p>